Thinking About: Art

I’ve been downloading a lot of Art lately. When I say a lot I mean a lot. Presently I have just under 2,000 examples of paintings and sculptures (though mostly paintings) that have, for various reasons, caught my eye. I realise that as I’m posting roughly 2 a week here the chances are that you won’t see most of them. I had thought of creating a second Blog just for the art but then I thought I spend enough time on-line as it is without maintaining two Blogs!

Most of what I have, and have already posted, is representative art – where a house looks like a house and a face has all of the right parts in the right place. I suppose that in some ways that makes me a philistine and uneducated in the finer points of art appreciation. I admit that I am mostly guilty as charged. Where and when I grew up we didn’t spend a whole lot of time looking at or discussing great art. I think we probably had a few school trips to local galleries but certainly nothing was expected to come of it. Admitting to liking art or expressing any kind of knowledge on the subject would get you, at best, some rather odd looks from the other pupils. Not that I was any kind of art aficionado in those days. Quite the contrary. That came much later.

Of course it’s difficult to avoid art completely. We see it on the covers of books, chocolate boxes and album covers. We see it on TV and in movies, at bus stops and even in computer games. If you look around you can see art in most places. Of course one of the best places, not counting the Internet, is (no surprise here) in art galleries themselves. I was lucky, whilst working in London, to walk past the National gallery and the National Portrait gallery on a daily basis. From time to time I’d either go home late, take a half day or come in on the weekend and spend an hour or six wandering the halls looking at some of the best paintings in the world. Most of them I could take or leave. I could appreciate the effort and the skill it took to produce them but they left me only intellectually engaged. A few, a very few, floored me with their beauty and magnificence. I have literally had my breath taken away with some paintings and found myself staring at them for minute after minute. Some of them are simply jaw droppingly beautiful and it is the power of that beauty that cuts like a knife. Others I marvelled at the ability to apparently paint with light and struggled to understand how a painting could seem to generate more light than it could possibly be receiving at that moment.

A few paintings surprised me a great deal. As I said above abstract art generally leaves me cold. Indeed I have spent several hours more than once with a good friend of mine visiting modern art galleries purely to poke fun at the exhibits. We had such a good time that we had almost been told to stop laughing so much or leave. Some of it though bypassed by understandable cynicism and sarcasm on the subject and, again, I starred at the open mouthed in astonishment. A few by Picasso can do this to me – Guernica being one of them. One of the most surprising is Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp first exhibited in 1913 (pictured at the head of this piece). I have no idea why I find it so fascinating. It certainly is very different from anything else I normally like. But there’s something about it that makes me go: Wow! Maybe that’s part of the attraction, that I don’t fully understand exactly why it has such an impact on me – that it bypasses my intellectual critical faculties and elicits a largely emotional response. Maybe that’s what great art is – something that doesn’t hit you between the eyes (or at least not just between the eyes) but hits you in the gut too? Maybe that explains some of the otherwise inexplicable responses to the early 20th century art forms of Cubism, Futurism and the other types of Avant-guard painting and sculpture that shocked and appalled so many. But I am still very much on a voyage of discovery where art is concerned. Maybe one day I’ll understand why I like some of it so much.