some way out of here -- painted doorways

To utilize art, to make it pay back, to find its function in daily life it’s necessary to consider our own limitations and the barriers we have built-in. We’re prone to habit, actually it’s worse than that. Anything we come across goes through an extensive recognition process shuffling through stacks of images stored in memory to match up with what we’re seeing and give it a name. In familiar territory the sorting goes by too quickly to notice, but as a tourist in a strange environment it’s occasionally possible to witness a lag time figuring out the scene in front of you. Your search function has had to reach further to find comparative information, and sad to say, if no matches are found you’re not seeing it.

This might sound strange but examples abound. The old line coach sees things on a football field the average fan never considers and a horse breeder appraises characteristics of a horse no one else notices. It sure seems the world around us is as broad as our own experience, a box that’s only as big as the places we’ve been, and most who travel say they see more when they get home. If it turns out our minds really work this way, only recognizing what’s been seen before, then how do we expand our field of vision and become more aware of the texture and detail in daily life? This becomes an increasingly pertinent question these days with a population enthralled in transitory screen images, which, along with the monotony of rush hour traffic and the uniformity of many abodes, flattens experience and limits the range of our perception.

Art extends vision and depth of awareness by stretching what the mind accepts as truth, or at least by posing the question. Strolling in the museum a particularly powerful painting can produce a sense of vertigo as the senses recalibrate to accommodate its bold assertions, and chances are the sky will seem bluer and birds will be singing out in the parking lot. Most art doesn’t work so quickly, but people have it around because it enhances their ability to see everything else. At this particular time especially, art is an escape hatch from the sense-narrowing mass-media world we inhabit, and an artist’s vision hanging on the wall reminds us of how much there is to see.