On Art

My good friend K is a brilliant painter. In the company of her craft, I am awed and humbled by her skills and quite embarrassed by my boorish tastes. The thing about art is, you’re often expected if not assumed to know it already to partake in the conversation, which makes it awkward for one to begin with a more primitive question: what is art even for?

Any attempt at a scholarly deconstruction of composition, stroke, or axis by a layman who can’t distinguish a flat from a filbert brush seems pompous and pretentious, but as its audience the one question to which we’re entitled, should be to inquire into its purpose.

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I am obsessed with Giogio De Chirico’s 1913 painting the Red Tower. I saw it in a textbook in my high school art class and it has left me transfixed for the next thirteen years.

No roads led to it. The tower rose abruptly from the desolate horizon, a monolith of ochre slouching against the cascading skies. A deep blue night descends ominously. The absence of life except the shadows and the waning sun, told of a looming, nameless calamity.

But is that what De Chirico meant to put on canvas? He might as well be trying to capture a bazaar waking to the first light of dawn and the night lifting. The light and shadows are left to our minds to play with. Only the stillness of the frame is constant.

De Chirico spoke of the duality of things: their physical appearance as we observed, and a spectral, metaphysical presence discerned by a few – he was ‘painting that which cannot be see’.  Somehow my teenage brain recognized, or so it thought it did, the eeriness, melancholic quality.

His canvas conveyed the ineffable. I listened.

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Back to K.

Art is pleasurable to her as is life and music and nature. From her canvas, I see her laugh as clearly as I could have heard it. Her thoughts infect me long after they have passed. Knowing nothing about her brush strokes or the technicalities of her execution, I still feel the blooming of spring.

Among my favorite pieces of her art was a painting I commissioned at the cost of a Guinness. It depicted a dream of mine. A field of wheat ablaze in gold, leaves dancing in the wind beneath vaulted skies. In the distance the sky is brooding, a rough storm awaits to be born.

She transcribed everything in my mind.

Art captures more than just the moment. Even the most photo-realistic painting is no replacement for an actual photograph. Art is dialogue. Art is relationship between the artist and her audience.

K paints for the same reason I write. I use words to transmit ideas. My words are the evidence of my thoughts. She uses the brush to convey her spirit, her canvas encapsulate her heart.

In this capacity of a person to inhabit the mind of another, unrestrained by time and space, art finds its meaning.

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