Everyday Canvas

Inside the Backstage of My Tastes

Prompt: Do you need to always find new music, authors, or actors, or do you stick with what you already know you like?

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Critics’ picks? No way! What I choose depends on the subject, and I am usually stricter with styles than age or time frame. At times, my preference for something lingers a while to establish in me. At times, judgment takes over emotion, deepening a better understanding of a piece. Usually, I pick what I like, emotionally speaking. Of all the areas the prompt asks, however, only literature and music have the central hold to my identity.

My tastes are pretty firm with music. I like most music; yet, I adore classical music, and I love ethnic music and folk songs, for some have to do with their local literature, as do the pop and country, but some forms of electronic music scratch my hearing worse than someone (like me) singing off-key.

With authors and literature, I am the most adventurous. As long as it is well-written, I adore all literature, genres, and poetry. I can’t even begin to list what I like as far as the written word is concerned. It would take volumes, as I am quite promiscuous with my choices in this area.

With visual arts, it is a pick and choose for me. As far as painting goes, I love Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Van Dyke, Munch, all the impressionists, quite a few Russian painters, nineteenth and early twentieth century American artists such as Turner, Sargent, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, and Norman Rockwell, and some later painters.

As to actors, I love the English very much. Is it the accent, I wonder, but Maggie Smith, Anthony Hopkins, Richard Burton, Judy Dench, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Ben Kingsley, Kate Winslet, Laurence Olivier, Peter Sellers, Cary Grant, and many others fascinate me.

I also like the American actors, such as: Meryl Streep, Elizabeth Taylor, Nicole Kidman, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Hepburn, Dustin Hoffman, Ellen Burstyn, Jodie Foster, Richard Gere, Shirley MacLaine, Greta Garbo, Jack Nicholson, Anne Hathaway, Paul Newman, Morgan Freeman, Diane Keaton, Gene Wilder, Gregory Peck, Susan Sarandon, Spencer Tracy, Anthony Quinn, Henry Fonda, Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau, Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner, Alec Baldwin, and many others…I did name a lot, didn’t I! Although there is more…

I guess in general, I like to stick with who or what has taken a foothold inside my mind; I am, however, open to the new, as long as what’s or who’s new lives up to its-his-her art.