The Odd Fellows Building

To the professor of Arts, artist: E. Bruce Phillips

I love downtowns of big cities. No matter how many downtowns I have been to (actually they add up to a big number: Greenville, Raleigh, Virginia Beach, Washington D.C, Miami, New York, Paris, Toronto, Orlando, New Orleans, Houston..), the excitement is still there inside me, fresh and vivid, whenever I have a chance to pay them a visit. I still remember when I just came to Atlanta seven years ago, its downtown really enchanted me with its significant beauty and well-designed buildings, its tightly-packed bars, clubs, its flows of people hastily walking back and forth on every street... Although I have been stopping by many times, coming back to Downtown Atlanta the other day, to the Odd Fellows Buildings, still seemed to be a new experience to me. The reason probably was that it was the first time I have ever had a chance to have a close look at an art gallery, the astounding paintings exhibited in the building.

Art is an important aspect of our lives that sometimes for some reason we don't appreciate as much as we should. It goes far beyond any technique or style, and for each individual, it is even believed to be a reflection of his or her own unique identity. Staying inside there, the magnificent Odd Fellows Buildings, looking at every painting exhibited, I suddenly vaguely realized that I had missed some important part of my life. Just recall those days last year when I stayed in Paris, a world famous city of Arts and Culture, for the whole week and figure out how much I had missed when I did not bother to enter any art museums which contained a great quantity of worldwide well-known artworks which plenty people had been dying to see. I had spent hours to contemplate Tour Eiffel, Seine River, Notre Dame Cathedral.. and those artworks were just right there around the corner, neglected.

Staying inside there, the magnificent Odd Fellows Buildings, looking at every painting exhibited, I, for the first time learned how to read artists' mind through their strokes of paintbrush, their technique of mixing colors into something that seems not to exist in this real life but does provoke something that is very real in spiritual life. I saw here and there pieces of downtown fragments that I have always dreamt of, faces of those people who I seemed to have met somewhere sometime in my life. I saw here and there some sorrow hidden, some happiness glowing, some desire bubbling over... However, after all, the thing I saw that remained in my eyes, in my soul was just beauty, the beauty I do not always see in this real life, the beauty that had been destroyed heartlessly by mankind's greediness, ignorance and cruelty. Is it true that you, the artists, have been exhausting every cell of your brain just in order to create the lost beauty that you want to give back to this struggling life?

Atlanta Metro College

Jeffrey Thai