Someone said they fell in love with a painting. There’s a chance it could be more than just an expression since a painting is a unique object and that in itself is increasingly rare. Starting from a blank surface everything about it, every mark, every color, and every idea came solely from one person. Deliberate or spontaneous, crude or precise, the artist’s personality emerges in art they make. Once made however the painting begins a life of its own as a complex and singular expression, the sum of uncountable individual decisions, every color and each brushstroke, until the vision is transcribed and made visible.
Something is encoded in the visual realm that words can’t quite touch, and trying to talk about it just takes us further away so let’s not. Instead just assume there are other ways of knowing, and that Van Gogh was saying something when he painted a pot of flowers that people from around the world, regardless of their spoken language, can comprehend and it’s not remotely about flowers. The person down the street, a cook, a tradesman, almost any menial you may run across could also be a painter, and they may not pull the weight of a Van Gogh but something comes out of their sheer effort, and it comes across to you if you stop to look. What happens after that is just automatic, you don’t even have to try.
Bonding, it’s a feeling affinity for the familiar and a built in feature of our operating system. We latch on to complexity in our surroundings, get to know it and fall in love. With family always there you may not have noticed, but country poets grow fond of the farmstead that doesn't change year after year, a favorite shirt is hard to throw away, and many feel sadness when the quirky old car finally quits, we’re born this way. Advertisers study our psychology and keep setting out little enticements to fall in love with their brand, running the same jingle over and over and putting their names on ballparks. They devise lots of nasty little tricks to take devious and self-serving advantage of our basic tendencies, but being the way we are turns out swell for art.
Here’s an experiment you can try over the next few decades. Go to a major city with a big art museum and spend some time looking at a few paintings, anything that catches your eye. Some works of art keep saying more the longer you look so take all afternoon, and then go home and don’t think about it for ten years. At this point take time off and go do it again. Those few paintings won’t look the same as first time, this time they’ll be friendlier. If you visit again ten years after that they’ll be glad to see you and you’ll be glad to see them, old acquaintances. If you’ve never had an involvement with a work of art, never really stopped to look and heard its questions in your head like how was it made, why is it so weird, and even questions you can’t name, then you probably won’t believe me.
So, go through your life seeing only shiny surfaces and machine design, dealing with digitized versions of reality while living in a cubicle and working from home, it’s an option, in fact that’s where it’s all headed unless some humanizing force intervenes. An original work of art suggests consideration on levels of thought seldom visited in the average commuter’s day and the lasting effect is to alter the way the world is perceived, broader, deeper, and in more detail. Chances are you’d never notice the increased gradients of information you’re observing or the the depth of discernment you apply watching the news, but you’ll be a little more fond of your painting year by year.
Something is encoded in the visual realm that words can’t quite touch, and trying to talk about it just takes us further away so let’s not. Instead just assume there are other ways of knowing, and that Van Gogh was saying something when he painted a pot of flowers that people from around the world, regardless of their spoken language, can comprehend and it’s not remotely about flowers. The person down the street, a cook, a tradesman, almost any menial you may run across could also be a painter, and they may not pull the weight of a Van Gogh but something comes out of their sheer effort, and it comes across to you if you stop to look. What happens after that is just automatic, you don’t even have to try.
Bonding, it’s a feeling affinity for the familiar and a built in feature of our operating system. We latch on to complexity in our surroundings, get to know it and fall in love. With family always there you may not have noticed, but country poets grow fond of the farmstead that doesn't change year after year, a favorite shirt is hard to throw away, and many feel sadness when the quirky old car finally quits, we’re born this way. Advertisers study our psychology and keep setting out little enticements to fall in love with their brand, running the same jingle over and over and putting their names on ballparks. They devise lots of nasty little tricks to take devious and self-serving advantage of our basic tendencies, but being the way we are turns out swell for art.
Here’s an experiment you can try over the next few decades. Go to a major city with a big art museum and spend some time looking at a few paintings, anything that catches your eye. Some works of art keep saying more the longer you look so take all afternoon, and then go home and don’t think about it for ten years. At this point take time off and go do it again. Those few paintings won’t look the same as first time, this time they’ll be friendlier. If you visit again ten years after that they’ll be glad to see you and you’ll be glad to see them, old acquaintances. If you’ve never had an involvement with a work of art, never really stopped to look and heard its questions in your head like how was it made, why is it so weird, and even questions you can’t name, then you probably won’t believe me.
So, go through your life seeing only shiny surfaces and machine design, dealing with digitized versions of reality while living in a cubicle and working from home, it’s an option, in fact that’s where it’s all headed unless some humanizing force intervenes. An original work of art suggests consideration on levels of thought seldom visited in the average commuter’s day and the lasting effect is to alter the way the world is perceived, broader, deeper, and in more detail. Chances are you’d never notice the increased gradients of information you’re observing or the the depth of discernment you apply watching the news, but you’ll be a little more fond of your painting year by year.
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