Thoughts on art and loveThe first time she saw the painting, it burned into her with an all consuming wave of great and massive emotion. Too forceful to be contained as it was: in the sterile surroundings of the gallery, they stood before it. He, having looked upon it many times before, flicked his gaze from the painting to her face drawing down her responses. He knew it intimately, understood with pinpoint precision the motivation of its creation. He sensed its vibration as clearly as an Inuit hunter felt the sliding, familiar movement of a seal beneath the ice. A basic, natural reaction to an element within the fabric of his life.
Shapes within danced under her gaze, she fancied she saw a carnival, a fiesta, rhythmic and repeating patterns of human joy expressed in dripped and splattered paint. Shifting perception gave way to feelings of organic, worldly matter and natural forces, seasonal and elemental; reversing tidal flows, circular breezes whisking fine sand into tiny tornados. She sensed it wasn't a painting depicting nature, but nature itself. Despite the vast size of the work, it sucked her down into an atom and showed her the world on the head of a pin. She didn’t know how long they’d stood there, but gradually the space between them and the painting had filled with bodies, distorting and staggering the view. They began to leave, walking through a tall doorway and into the next space. She turned once through the door and saw the painting, perfectly framed in the aperture; contained and contained again. She wondered if he felt the contradiction of it all. This work, created in an unlit, unheated shed, the Atlantic ocean pounding naked rock nearby as the unhindered seasons merged into each other, taken from its birthplace to hang in this clean, blind-white place. Absolute purity as art. It seemed a contradiction to her, one sitting at an awkward angle to her preconceived ideals of exactly what constituted "good" art. But it had crashed through those staunch, narrow ideals, stripped away the flash and glamour she had so craved like acid consuming layered years of cracking paint on an old door. It was proof that nothing is determined, everything can change and, just as summertime outside the tall windows of the gallery was brightly easing itself into autumn, the soul has its own seasons too. It can weather great sadness, extreme happiness and everything in between. And it grows strong, with infinite capacity for joy, if you tend to it and are kind. She looked at his face as they travelled down the escalator, debating where to have lunch. She thought that, for once, they didn’t need to pick apart what had just happened, as they so often did with almost everything else. Unspoken affirmation wrapped them up together as they emerged into the dappled sunlight trickling through the birch trees. |