Heard a story about how Marc Chagall deep in his nineties was shown a painting he had done around nineteen twelve and after looking for a moment he started to cry, so sweet such a quaint old man. His patronizing fans could not travel back with him to a drafty studio, his friends and the life he had back then, but the painting sent him down a long dark wormhole and left him smoking his pipe close by a wood stove, the smell of turpentine in the air and horses in the street, good times. Paintings have a way of absorbing events and experiences and then releasing them back during a moment’s contemplation, places lived and things seen.
To be clear I’m talking about real art and not whatever someone happens to have on the wall at the time, as easily forgotten as last year’s calendar. Original art from the hand of an artist has a presence museum posters or mass produced mall art don’t possess, similar in a way to the difference between music in live performance and anything recorded. It’s an argument that can be settled only by direct experience, and it’s the reader’s responsibility to verify this simple fact on their own. Assuming it’s so, by depicting a moment’s experience within a matrix of skill and manual effort, time is arrested and the artist manages to put a foot in the revolving door of daily experience.
A painting bought when young for too much money at the time, to celebrate graduation or the new job, to mark an arrival in a different city or just because you didn’t want to let it get away, will pay for itself over and over in the years ahead. From the date of purchase the painting forgets its artist and begins remembering the life of its new owner going forward. A few pieces of original art becomes a personal entourage, inhabiting the walls each time there’s a move and in between witnessing daily joy and strife, finally becoming a repository of all that mileage as close by as a cup of coffee and a moment to reflect. Art can bind a lifetime together by halting and gathering time in significant moments, creating islands in a constantly-streaming river of memory and enabling more potent and tangible recollections than a tumble of old photos and videos with no artistic value of their own.
Time is flapping at the edges these days, the great wars overlap as centuries collapse and history becomes a blur, while possible futures are trending on a highly volatile and virulently contagious form of instantaneous group-think right there in everybody’s hand. The very act of painting speaks of a different time frame and the painting in itself insists on an extended attention span to even comprehend its image. Over time there’s also reason to wonder why it still seems so fresh and compelling when everything else in the room has become familiar and largely goes unnoticed. Art is a time-binder, a recorder and witness that lives with you and is seen every day, not sequestered on a bookshelf or compressed in a digital cloud, and having it around provides perspective on the years as they flow by.
To be clear I’m talking about real art and not whatever someone happens to have on the wall at the time, as easily forgotten as last year’s calendar. Original art from the hand of an artist has a presence museum posters or mass produced mall art don’t possess, similar in a way to the difference between music in live performance and anything recorded. It’s an argument that can be settled only by direct experience, and it’s the reader’s responsibility to verify this simple fact on their own. Assuming it’s so, by depicting a moment’s experience within a matrix of skill and manual effort, time is arrested and the artist manages to put a foot in the revolving door of daily experience.
A painting bought when young for too much money at the time, to celebrate graduation or the new job, to mark an arrival in a different city or just because you didn’t want to let it get away, will pay for itself over and over in the years ahead. From the date of purchase the painting forgets its artist and begins remembering the life of its new owner going forward. A few pieces of original art becomes a personal entourage, inhabiting the walls each time there’s a move and in between witnessing daily joy and strife, finally becoming a repository of all that mileage as close by as a cup of coffee and a moment to reflect. Art can bind a lifetime together by halting and gathering time in significant moments, creating islands in a constantly-streaming river of memory and enabling more potent and tangible recollections than a tumble of old photos and videos with no artistic value of their own.
Time is flapping at the edges these days, the great wars overlap as centuries collapse and history becomes a blur, while possible futures are trending on a highly volatile and virulently contagious form of instantaneous group-think right there in everybody’s hand. The very act of painting speaks of a different time frame and the painting in itself insists on an extended attention span to even comprehend its image. Over time there’s also reason to wonder why it still seems so fresh and compelling when everything else in the room has become familiar and largely goes unnoticed. Art is a time-binder, a recorder and witness that lives with you and is seen every day, not sequestered on a bookshelf or compressed in a digital cloud, and having it around provides perspective on the years as they flow by.
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