My mother had a cow when she discovered I was dating an artist. “Don’t marry him,” she warned, even though I was only fifteen. “What’s he going to feed you – stones?” This last was a pointed jibe at her sister who was living hand-to-mouth with her painter husband and their four kids. She needn’t have worried, but she had a point.
The paradigm of the penniless laborer of love is stark to me, but even so, a world without art would be an existence taken for granted. Here’s why I think so.
Art makes us think ‘what if’?
Even fat, white clouds taper off into tendrils at the ends. What if those tendrils, attached to a basket, could lift us into the sky? I was swallowed into a vacuum when I first saw Vladimir Kush’s ‘Metamorphosis’, a painting depicting exactly that. My mind became so clear my ears started to ring. Why the reaction? Because I was no longer looking at the painting; I was imagining what the people in the cloud-hot-air-balloon could see over the hill beyond the river. What beautiful panorama had freedom opened to them? And what truer freedom than to be suspended by the sky itself?
Quick disclaimer: I can’t draw a damn thing – even my stick figures need labeled body parts. But art makes me stop and think ‘what if?’ which, to a child is not even a question. When I was five years old, an umbrella was a walking stick that could turn me into a doddering old dame or a fearless mountaineer; or, opened and laid sideways, a tent in a teeming rainforest.
For Finnish photographer Erik Johansson, who retouches images to create surrealist scenes, a white blanket is an undulation of snow-covered valleys and slopes and the earth can cleave in two as if the ground were made of felt if you can locate its zipper. When you view a work of art, you vicariously put yourself in it. You move the pieces around; the better the art, the more to manipulate. The next time you view M.C. Escher’s gravity-defying, optical illusion-like mazes such as the lithograph ‘Relativity’, see if you don’t try to find your way “out” of it.
Art captures meanings the rest of us don’t even notice
Have you ever put yourself in the shoes of a fatally-wounded soldier lying prostrate in an empty field? While there are innumerable on-the-ground accounts of war, Wilfred Owen’s poem, ‘Futility’ casts the irony of the sun cresting the horizon behind the dying soldier, heedless to his graceless departure, highlighting the needlessness of the millions of war casualties. The symbols evoke truisms beyond what is seen and heard – and art searches for meaning beyond the surface. Small wonder then, that American lecturer Walter B. Pitkin wrote, “You will get little or nothing from the printed page if you bring it nothing but your eye.”
Surrealist painter Rene Magritte was an expert at expressing intangibles tangibly – sometimes in disturbing ways. Magritte’s infamous painting, ‘Rape’, showed a woman’s face framed by curls, but with breasts in place of eyes, the navel as a nose and the pubis forming a mouth. A rapist doesn’t see a woman’s face, for she is an object. In ‘The Human Condition’, Magritte stood a painting on an easel next to a window so that the painting appeared a seamless continuation of the view outside, yet it obscured the real thing. “If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but thinking of the question that has been raised,” he once said of its meaning.
Art feeds our own passion
The more “pointless” a piece of art, the more beautiful it is to me, for art that has no utilitarian purpose is proof of the love in a human heart; such as British artist Grahame Hurd-Wood’s vow to paint everyone in St. David’s in Wales, or that Damien Hirst even thought of slicing cows, sharks and sheep in two and placing them in formaldehyde-preserved glass cases.
On days when my morale flags, I crank up music by some of the greatest vocalists – Aretha Franklin, Mariah Carey, Josh Groban – stand before the mirror and lip-synch, imbibing the passion in their voices and making it mine, giving me the push I need to write. It doesn’t matter that I can’t sing. Thanks to artists like Bruce Munro, we can walk amongst fields of 20,000 glowing fairy lights, as in his recent installation in Cheekwood, approaching, as best we can, the world inhabited by Tinker Bell and Peter Pan.
Look for art, wallow in those feelings, ask yourself ‘what if?’ and embrace the goose bumps that rise when you hear a piece of music. But most of all, remember that heaven is not a location.
