art love -- not complicated

So, let’s talk about love, it’s a sacred thing, scary and complex, but maybe not so difficult to understand in a mechanical sense. In the overall field of our attention, love adds the element of attachment, a special sensitivity to a certain stream of information. Love makes the other person more noticeable in a crowd, easier to understand in a restaurant, and more desirable than anyone else in the room, such as that. Farmers love their land, the lay of the creek, the smell of the barn, just as almost anyone else who becomes intimately familiar with anything eventually falls in love -- it’s in the wiring, we’re born that way.

Mostly love is fleeting, and for a moment even pickup trucks can beguile, until the new model comes along. If only some way could be found to capture and hold this elusive quality, to burnish it and make it stronger. Consider the painting you bought in a pawn shop, off the wall in a restaurant, strolling the annual art fair, have you looked at it recently? This isn’t all on you, it’s the art’s job to make you notice. It has an advantage over whatever else you have on your wall just by being unique, direct from a human hand. If it’s thoughtful and deep enough, it will show you something a little different each time you look, and sooner or later, could take years, you’ll begin to experience that little burst of joyful recognition juice in your hippocampus each time you come across some detail you’d forgotten, sure feels like love.

The affection that people feel for art ‘that’s been in the family’ for years, perhaps bought to celebrate a new job or a new city long ago, has nothing to do with market value, the fame or obscurity of the painter, and is caused instead by a kind of enduring entanglement, they’ve fallen in love in a classic sense. It could be said that art is, in fact, the distillation of the humanity somehow lost in the extruded, vacuum-formed, and 3-D printed environment we inhabit day-to-day, comes in a form both portable and companionable, and as such is legitimately worthy of affection.

In this upside down version, the most important person in all of art is the citizen who buys and hangs original art in their own home, an investment made in their own future and quality of life, and an invisible constituency quite forgotten in most narratives. In their attempt to portray the world as seen, artists reveal much both personal and universal, and when the viewer recognizes their own experience, thoughts and feelings, in a work of art, it means they’ve found a new friend. Taking this new friend home means the artist can buy more paint, pay more rent, and get better. Over time, seen and lived with everyday, the painting bought becomes like family, a witness that can remind its owner years later of all the things it’s seen, more than a friend.