Finding The Language Of Art

I am beginning a new voyage into unknown territory - the worldly dimension of Art. When I was young I drew, painted, and loved making art but then I stopped, pursuing Words instead. Thinking and reason became my tools of worldly investigation, science the field of my attention. But last night I saw the language of Art and it is enticing me to enter a new doorway.

Over dinner with some A-list art scholars (an art museum director, a curator, and an art consultant), I really saw for the first time how art is a doorway of self-discovery and what lies in its wake.

I'm a late bloomer to the art world. In college when most students are exposed to this Truth in Humanities or Art History classes, I opted out for Feminist Studies instead (it was the early 70s). I missed the tour through the minds of artists across the ages, not learning words such as post-modernism, cubism, or names like DeKooning, Leger, etc.

Today, I still don't have the labels or memory stores of Who's Who in the Art world or its history, but I suddenly 'get it', the why and what is Art passion, Art addiction, and Art collecting alike.

Art is a means of self-discovery, a quiet, non-verbal expression of mind - one's own attempt to share a glimpse of the vast and infinite Beauty (or Truth) through visual expression, beyond words.

All the facades of pretense I associated with Art Collectors, Art Scholars, and Art Intellectuals are stripped away when a piece of Art truly speaks.

It juts beyond all words.

Finding such a piece of art - one speaking of Truth clearly - must be like wading through a vast body of moving water to find a single lily pad delicately balanced in stillness. I don't know exactly, right now it is just a feeling, I've never before taken this road. But for the first time last night I see an uncharted land lies ahead of me - a world of Art and Artists attempting to convey this Truth through a language I am just beginning to learn.

I feel as though I was handed a flashlight in a dark room and beckoned to begin to explore.

Comments

[elmerfude]

Art, science and poetry have revealed more about the astonishing beauty and terror at loose in the creation than religion has in two thousand years. No wonder religion is fading as a epistemological force if it ever was one.

[Dap]

Dear Elmerfude,
Eloquently expressed, you ol'romantic you. Agape, dap

[Dap]

Dear Dr. Smalley,

I am, so exciyed for you, my experience is different, I've told this storty before on Huffingtn poimst years ago now, I was 11 years o;d when myself and a friend snuck to downtown Chicago, the Art instute of Chicago was our place to hang out, how wonderous, it has been love ever scince. You must go sometime, They have a wonderful web-site also. You have to experience the Seurat :
http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/seurat/seurat_themes.html
Agape, dapper

[Olivia Rosewood - Huffpost Blogger]

Wow, what an amazing discovery to make. I look forward to hearing more about your flash lit exploration. Van Gogh had moments of profound heightened awareness of the connectedness of all that is, of the life in every being, animate and inanimate, however troubled he was when we was not creating. To me, he communicates the aliveness of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=.com/watch?v=XemweIAvi8Q&feature=related

[elmerfude]

As a student of petroglyphs I find the shamanic trance flight experience to be represented in the figures of this "primitive" art. But the same shamanic imagery shows up in children's art and in the work of Klee, Miro, Chagall, Giacometti to name several. There is a Jungian thing going on that taps into the collective unconscious. In his journals, Miro described this shamanic experience in direct terms. Chagall's work is replete with shamanic imagery.

[Dap]

Outstanding Elmer, an enjoyable read.