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Posted on 1/27/2018 8:21:02 PM
By Donald Fox
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The history of modern art is filled with arguments about who saw what, knew what, or made what, where, and when. Statements by various artists are sometimes contradictory of others or themselves. There are claims of relationships and influences and disavowals of relationships and influences. It’s an intriguing web of claims and counter claims by artists and critics alike. At the center of much controversy was a rivalry between Matisse and Picasso for the title of leading modern/avant-garde painter, Paris being the primary location where both artists did their main work. As revolutionary as both painters were, neither was the first to question or experiment with traditional ways of representing ideas in paintings. Both were likely influenced by the Impressionist revolution that emphasized direct experience of nature over academic formulas, but more so by the unique painters sometimes called Post-Impressionist like Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent Van Gogh. Each of these artists bent the rules, so to speak, by intellectually and emotionally expressing personal visions quite different from stylistic variations that might distinguish other artists from those working in the same basic tradition of landscape, portraiture, or contemporary setting. So unique were the visions of these three artists that it is easy to recognize work by each of them. Neither would be confused with any other artist working at the same time as them.
After the development of cubism, Picasso remained at the forefront for a time, but many movements developed rapidly throughout Europe despite two world wars. Some might even say that because of the wars art moved in new directions where artists began to question many aspects of social order and traditional thinking. Intuition, the subconscious, and irrationality became legitimate sources for creative expression. The visual arts, music, theater, and literature all explored possibilities within these new areas of experience. Spiritual expression took the form of dream images, mythmaking, and exploration of human consciousness across cultures and generations rather than traditional religious belief such as Christianity and other formal religiosity.
Early abstract proponents in America followed European models exemplified by Picasso and Matisse, but by the early forties certain artists began a new abstract formalism inspired by a universal spiritual expression that called upon mythology in the western tradition (most often Greek and Roman myths) that somewhat ironically had also informed much Renaissance painting and its development of a powerful new realism. The same Renaissance painters that painted iconic Christian images also painted bacchanals filled with nymphs, satyrs, and other mythical creatures (themes that Picasso in particular returned to throughout his life although in his personal abstract style). American formalists like Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and early Jackson Pollock titled completely abstract works with metaphorical, mythical, and symbolic titles, and Newman even referenced Jewish and some Christian belief in his work. What initially seemed to be completely abstract actually contained subtext by implication, for there was no way to recognize anything specific from the fully abstract (non-objective) imagery.
These seeming contradictions have made much modern painting (modern considered beginning at the turn of the twentieth century) incomprehensible to large numbers of viewers. Even after more than one hundred years of abstraction, much modern art remains obscure to those that have not learned some of the basic visual language. Additionally, many artists over the past fifty or so years have consciously sought obscurity as part of their expressive content. Some have viewed the audience as beneath them and resorted to insult, antagonism, and controversy as supposed ways to make their work unique or powerful (in their own minds). This has led to numerous declarations that painting is dead, or at the least no longer a viable form of artistic expression. Even so, artists continue to paint, to create, and much of it is as exciting as any work created in the previous two thousand years.
Posted on 1/22/2018 5:45:38 PM
By Donald Fox
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Heading to school each weekday, I drive south on the Gulf Freeway that eventually leads to Galveston, but I only go as far as Webster, a small community close to NASA. The freeway parallels one flight path for aircraft headed north to Hobby Airport. During winter months when the sun hasn’t fully risen, I can see a plane’s landing lights suddenly emerge from darkened sky and gradually grow larger and brighter while also separating into two lights from one. A new light emerges from the grey backdrop every fifteen minutes or so.
While navigating that five lane stretch of roadway at sixty-five to seventy miles an hour, I am intrigued by the appearance of something from nothing. I remember as a child looking for UFOs in the sky day or night but disappointingly never seeing one. For a second or two, my adult mind toys with the thought of a UFO emerging with the morning light rather than a commercial airliner, but that never happens either. What’s more intriguing is that moment where the light manifests from thin air, as it were. There is nothing but sky or cloud, and then there is a point of light. I move toward it and it toward me even faster than my movement toward it, yet the light’s increase is very much slow motion. I could be in a dream were I not also conscious of the fast-moving traffic. Everyone is in a rush including me.
Nothing and then something. This is like the blank paper or canvas onto which an artistic vision will grow, will increase in size one stroke, one color, one motion at a time, spreading over the surface and reaching to the borders, the edges that seem to stop that motion but really create a window, a definitive space within which another kind of space develops with power and grace. That new space may feel close and intimate, possibly claustrophobic, or it may expand to limitless reach even as it is defined by those borders that can so easily disappear. The mind is captivated by the interplay of color and shape and motion that is going nowhere. It has substance and no substance within the same moment. The virtual and the concrete are perfectly balanced by the seeing eye and the perceiving brain. Imagination is captured on a surface that only a moment before was flat, blank, and unremarkable. Then, something flying through space smacked into that nondescript plane, animated it, opened it to possibility, and set into motion wave after wave of speculation, a process continuously repeated every time it is observed. What a joy to look and to discover.
Posted on 1/20/2018 9:04:24 PM
By Donald Fox
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We call this the information age or the digital age, which for those born before about 1975 will mean something different from what it means to those born after. The latter will have grown up with computers, the internet, and ready access to information as a matter of everyday experience. Raw information, however, can be misleading. Without the ability to think critically, to question and to verify information, any given amount of information may be of little use. If all one does is use Wikipedia or some sponsored website that has paid for a high search result placement, the information found may not be accurate or complete. Given today’s contentious social environment, information may also be radically skewed to a particular point of view. Then there is the outright fake news, what used to be called misinformation or propaganda. The use of critical thinking is especially important to sort through the hype, the sensationalism, the biased, and the factually inaccurate information that comes at us from all directions.
Not everything, of course, is factually based. Any of us can look at the same set of facts and develop quite different conclusions. In the sciences, processes have been developed to address these disagreements, which largely work to resolve inaccuracies if not always to create agreement. There remains the question of interpretation of test results and subsequent meaning. Generally, though, science moves forward with everything subject to future reevaluation. Art, philosophy, religion, metaphysics, and certain soft sciences (sociology, for example) are far more malleable and less certain regarding truth and meaning. A particular world view (set of beliefs) can color all other perceptions. Thus, we find the great social stew that is the world in which we live.
At some levels this is very exciting and stimulating as we find an amazing variety of creative expression. When that artistic expression is directed toward social issues, we encounter work that is revelatory, critical, or propagandistic. Revelatory might include work by Käthe Kollwitz, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, or American Social Realist painters like George Luks. Artists taking a critical view could include Andy Warhol (whose work is often ironic), Ben Shahn, or James Rosenquist. Propaganda can be positive as in the case of Norman Rockwell’s idyllic visions of Americana or more negative as in anti-German and -Japanese posters used during World War II or some of modern German artist Gerhard Richter’s pop realism (images of Nazism in Germany including his family members). Many American photorealist painters during the sixties and seventies dispassionately evoked their subjects by rendering bits of visual information essentially fragmenting an image into small parts that were then laboriously reproduced on canvas to recreate the image at often over life size. The visual information had little to do with any social meaning (in effect treating realism as abstraction).
In one sense, information today has supplanted knowledge. It’s not what you know but what you can access. Meaning takes a back seat to accumulation of information. Info-bits and bytes reduce reality to short bursts of information that emphasize momentary fascination (social media) but little long-term consistency and meaning (Twitter and tweeting). Fortunately, we still have books, libraries, and museums, and the vast wealth of art that has been willed to us from previous generations. Let’s hope that at least some of us continue to do the same for those who follow.
Posted on 1/17/2018
By Donald Fox
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Remarkable beauty exists all over this planet on which we live.
As a child I often saw pictures of places that seemed exotic and interesting and someday I hoped to visit.
Even without those exotic settings, however, I did experience pristine beaches, fragrant pine forests, rolling blue cast mountains, aerial views of plains and forests and ocean, rich hues of large and small flowers, variegated greens of bogs and kudzu and stands of corn, the billowing clouds of summer storms and slate grey skies before a winter snow.
Birds and beetles and all manner of furry creatures that inhabited my native state of North Carolina or languished in local zoos expanded the color spectrum that surrounded me wherever I went.
All of these fed and were transformed by the world of dreams and dreaming, memory filtered through imagination, and push-pull of family, friends, and social norms.
There are many awakenings in the course of life. Enlightenment is not a flash of awareness that alters the shape of the universe, at least not for me.
The bright blue grows pale towards the horizon and fades into the deeper blue of distant ocean waters teeming with hidden life and all manner of dramatic conclusions flowing relentlessly towards the shore on which I stand gazing out and peering in, one vast simultaneous breath like an eternal sigh of belief.
That is one and every moment so momentous and ordinary it can be overlooked by the sleight of hand we call distraction, inaction, the opposite of attraction.
Or, I can pick up a brush swathed in color and stroke across a scape so monumental an entire lifetime flows the length of an arm in that sweep of a second that is second to none.
Posted on 1/14/2018 8:12:26 PM
By Donald Fox
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This first long weekend in January has been something of a mixed blessing. It began on a sad note. One of our cats, who had been sick for almost two weeks and was undergoing treatment by our vet, had to be put to sleep on Friday. She had been running an extremely high temperature, and her bloodwork showed a serious infection with several possible diseases as culprit. Two were potentially fatal. She was obviously very uncomfortable, not eating much, and not responding to treatment. We consulted another vet who corroborated the potentially deadly diagnoses, so we made our decision and let our little friend go. Too many times in the past we had tried in vain to keep pets alive, more for our own sake than theirs, but that just made us and them feel worse overall. We didn’t want to drag things out for this little spirit. For all the clichés about death being a part of life, when the time comes, it is never easy nor without sadness and some regret. We take solace in giving them a good and loving home for as long as they are willing to stay.
Art, on the other hand, is something that has a sense of permanency about it. Usually, art far outlives its creator and can move through numerous households or venues on its journey through the world. I’ve often been asked if it’s difficult to let a painting go, the thought being that it is a personal creation and as such a part of myself not unlike a child. I’ve heard other artists express this idea, their art being their children, their progeny, and I suppose there is a bit of attachment to much of what I do. It’s very different from owning a car, a fine stereo system, or some other tangible object. Art is a personal creation and represents emotional, temporal, educational, intellectual, and manual investment – and for many artists there also is a spiritual investment or connection to work, certainly to the process of work. Mostly, though, art is made to share with the world.
Sometimes, I may want to hold certain pieces for a time to watch the development of the group as subsequent paintings are built on what comes before. This is part of expressive growth where that group makes a larger statement than any single piece, and in reality, the larger statement informs how individual pieces may be viewed. I think of the many series that painters like Monet or Pissarro created. Each painting stands alone as unique works, but when taken together, the effect is multiplied for the scope of ideas is expanded far beyond what a single piece can do. Obvious differences that show changes in light over the course of a day are one consideration, but sometimes the same scene is painted multiple times at the same time of day. In these the artists plays with style and technique to create variations on a limited theme. I suspect, from my own experience, that every painting has its unique importance in the mind of the painter. But, to let them go? Do old ones leave to make room for the new? Don’t we often have multiple perceptions regarding a single event? Does one memory fade to be replaced by another?
Personally, I don’t feel overly attached to any one piece. I may appreciate greater success in one or another, but I’m happy to let either go. I know there is always the possibility that with any painting if I hold it for too long, it may well get reworked as innovative ideas occur in its presence. I can always create a variation, but I’m aware how quick and easy it is to change what is there in front of me. Works do get transformed in the process of creation, and that process may have seemed to have stopped until a later decision restarts it again. So now what was there is no more. Perhaps this concept of change and renewal (of sorts) helps me to not get overly attached. And, pieces may be gone, but they are not forgotten. With that in mind, today I sold two paintings – both of which I really like – but now they have a new home and an excited new caretaker. Their memory will linger and inform new works as will that sweet little being I buried day before yesterday.
Posted on 1/11/2018
By Donald Fox
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Art is not science, and although there may be an art to the practice of science, science is not art. Science is based on factual information, experimentation, and verification of observations, ideas, and research. It is not simply a set of beliefs. Although some artists use scientific methods as part of their artistic process (photographers using precision equipment to capture optical effects, painters relying on chemical consistency of materials, sculptors utilizing scientifically derived information about metals and other substances, as just a few examples), it is the intuitive and emotional side of creative expression that separates art from science. Mathematicians may find beauty in the elegance of certain mathematical proofs, but again, they are focused more on reason and logic in the application of math principles to resolve practical issues.
Art almost always uses metaphor as a means to express emotion and concepts. Something represents or stands for something else. Art is symbolic statement rather than literal and can be interpreted in numerous ways (the purview of metaphor). Art can be very serious, films like Sophie’s Choice or Schindler’s List as examples, but it is also entertainment, an invitation to step into an alternate realm and imaginative experience. Art doesn’t necessarily set out to prove anything; however, it may question assumptions about perception and understanding. Both the previously mentioned films present characters confronting almost impossible situations, the choices they make and actions they take, and then the consequences of those choices and actions. The stories are crafted in such ways that we the audience empathize with the emotional struggles of the characters in powerful ways, and we may even project ourselves into those situations to question how we might react were we faced with similar circumstances.
Scientists pursue the why behind the universe. What makes things work the ways they do? Something may appear one way on the surface, but why is it that way and how did that come to be? These questions are best applied to the physical universe, and we can see a marvelous journey from ancient superstitious beliefs about the world to our modern understanding. We have accumulated enormous factual information and explanations, but we have also learned that our understanding is continuously adjusted by new discoveries.
Perhaps the biggest challenges for science are in those realms of inner experience rather than external. The human heart and mind so readily entered by art’s imaginative pathways are more obscure and dense when approached by science. We cannot so easily separate emotions, feelings, and thoughts, the inner machinations of the individual consciousness, to objective scrutiny and experimentation. We can observe behavior but are often guessing about motivation and purpose. Psychology and psychiatry are both considered sciences, but neither has the clarity or precision of biology or medicine and likely never will have. Sometimes art forms (narratives or images) are used as diagnostic tools, as indicators, or as therapy with certain patients, but there is always a large subjective component to interpreting responses. This challenges the more rigid requirements of scientific inquiry.
Art and science will most likely continue parallel development with occasional cross-pollination, hopefully to the enhancement of both. Neither will fully embrace the other for each has its own parameters and purpose. The stringency required in science would stifle creativity in art, and the intuitive freedom of art can only occasionally influence scientific insight. A healthy coexistence, however, is beneficial to both.
Posted on 1/10/2018
By Donald Fox
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Last night we had dinner with friends visiting from Austin who were in town for one of them to give a presentation on healing family issues, specifically between parent and adult child. These friends travel frequently doing workshops and seminars, she being a therapist and he a retired Canadian rancher, poet, and primary support person for his partner. They’re a great couple we’ve known for years (her the longest). Both are creative, fun, and complement each other in their life journey.
My wife and I have not been able to travel much the past five or six years because of work commitments and family issues, so it was a great pleasure to share in some of their experiences that over dinner spanned Greece, Croatia, France, Mexico, New Zealand, and Australia. I know people from each of these countries, have other friends who have been to most of them, and though I’ve only been to Mexico and Canada as well as parts of Scandinavia and Russia, I still feel very much connected even without the internet.
I was fortunate to have teachers who encouraged reading and expanding personal horizons. Access to information via newscasts was not lost on me even as a child in pre-computer, pre-internet days. I was fascinated by travel programs, adventures in the wild, and exotic places pictured in encyclopedias from our living room bookshelf. I spent many hours in the public library combing through books on geography and history. I learned very early that history is the story of who we are, not just a collection of remote past events. Every place has its history and every place we go we make a history in that place. I thought of the many connecting currents as our friends spoke of the intersecting paths with people who led them to places on their first trip together to Greece that were not on their original agenda. Seemingly accidental meetings from a larger frame of reference could be perceived as a purposeful route of discovery.
The making of a visual piece of art is just such a journey. Often it is preplanned with several versions sketched in advance before the final map (design) is chosen. Once that designed is sketched out, the more intimate exploration of its secrets commences. Discoveries change the parts as well as the maker who often changes his thinking according to both logical and emotional response to what is developing in front of him. It is not unlike visiting places that inspire awe, evoke peace, or excite the senses. We always take our experiences with us, which tend to affect the experience of the moment, but we are also changed by the experience of the place. For the painter, dozens or hundreds of memories can flood into a painting, and any one of these can alter its direction. Many writers have expressed the idea that they don’t know what they think until they write it down and then read what they have written. This is the creative action that brings meaning to any work of art. The artist holds up the mirror, and the mirror reflects both here and there.
Posted on 1/9/2018
By Donald Fox
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Dreams are most often episodic, but sometimes my dreams are full blown narratives. I suppose this is one reason I have been drawn to much sci-fi writing including fantasy and tales of bizarre circumstances. Joyce Carol Oates and Paul Bowles are two favorite writers for each creates tales that take readers into alternate worlds where people live on the fringe or where an uneasiness or edginess defines reality. None of these stories, or my dreams for that matter, are too far removed from ordinary reality if one considers the variety of perspectives from which the world is viewed on any given day. For example, there is the world of those that present the news to us daily: the reporters, the investigators, the researchers, the sportscasters and weather people who project an air of normalcy.
We are advised to carry an umbrella or a light jacket to begin the day or to be aware that it will be rainy when it is time to pick up the kids. Teams vie to get to the playoffs, tax time is just a few months away, or certain products may have overstated their practicality. News is mundane or it is horrifying. Brutality often far exceeds that presented in dramatic fiction. Celebrities are acknowledged for their support of humanitarian causes or excellent performances but are outed for sexual misconduct. A child is found chained in a basement – or as Paul Simon once wrote more than twenty-five years ago, “These are the days of miracle and wonder… /The way the camera follows us in slo-mo/The way we look to us all.”
We tend to express conflicting views of the world around us. Consider some of our clichés: “life imitates art,” “truth is stranger than fiction,” “art imitates life,” “this is unreal,” “too good to be true,” “all’s fair in love and war,” “time heals all wounds,” “nothing worth having comes easily,” “nothing worth knowing can be taught,” “love you more than life itself,” “laughter is the best medicine,” “there’s nothing new under the sun,” and on and on. There are clichés for nearly every possible experience, but like many approaches to understanding, clichés obscure that which is to be understood. They have an appearance of truth, but they obfuscate by oversimplifying and put us into ready agreement rather than perceptive insight. We make conflicting politics, religions, economics, and social organizations all while seeking essentially to meet the same basic needs. Life is paradox.
Artists attempt to reveal something about the world through description, through juxtaposition, through new context, and through the beauty of words, sounds, motions, and images. Philosophers and scientists similarly seek understanding through their unique perspectives. There is no one pathway to comprehension, for the mind is capable of varieties of perception, yet for so many there seems to be such strong desire to believe in one true thing, and that thing will then govern everything else (and everyone else). What if, though, truth has many forms? What if the truth of a flower is just as absolute as the truth of a bird or the truth of a human being? We have the capacity to express love and the capacity to express violence. Which is the more sustaining and rewarding? We have the ability to create beauty and the ability to create ugliness. Which is the more uplifting? We have the ability to choose, and the choice is always ours.
Posted on 1/8/2018
By Donald Fox
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An empty canvas or an empty page is like an empty cup. Either will hold many different things, but not everything that can be held is worth imbibing. The page can take past, present, and future and roll them into one continuous stream for that is what life is – a forward movement in time with occasional visits to places been and glimpses of places to be. Some have observed that the future is always in motion. It is full of possibility that can manifest in unexpected ways. We make plans, but we also plan for the unexpected. In many ways life is a process of exploration determined by awareness in the moment.
Art, as a derivative of life, evolves from process given tangible form. The process may be messy or unstructured as the artist seeks appropriate form, but ultimately the expression is made concrete according to design. The artist controls intellectually, emotionally, or intuitively the creative forces necessary for the expression to manifest. Control may be a matter of choice, applied skill, the shape of content, or imaginative play, but it also requires willingness to be open to possibilities in the moment. There may be no accidents, but there are missed opportunities.
Posted on 1/5/2018 6:23:25 PM
By Donald Fox
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I read a National Geographic article today about a new artificial muscle that is “as flexible as an octopus, as strong as an elephant, and as fast as a hummingbird.” The acronym HASEL (hydraulically amplified self-healing electrostatic actuator”) describes the device made from cheap plastic (think potato chip bags) into pouches filled with insulated vegetable oil. A mild electrical charge causes the liquid to move and the pouches mimic grasping or lifting depending on the design. A third design can delicately grasp raw eggshells or fresh raspberries without crushing them. Scientists’ goal is to create more lifelike movement for robots and ultimately to power human prosthetics.
Technological progress is ongoing. Artificial intelligence, robotic machines, synthetic organs and body parts, plus thousands of other innovations suggest possibilities of future machines that could displace humans in pretty much everything except creative thought and expression. Some artists are quick to adapt technology to their expressive means, so it’s not beyond imagining that computers or robots could be programmed to create within prescribed parameters. Whether computers could become self-aware and self-motivated is not beyond conception either.
There is the human factor, however, that likely will never be displaced. During the Renaissance as artists explored how to represent the world around them as realistically as possible, they employed various tools, sighting devices, perspective machines, and the camera obscura to help them see, capture, and understand what they were seeing. Tracing an outline of something, though, might help in the render of proportions, but it would not help in choice of colors or manipulation of paint. The artistic touch was still required to elevate a piece from a mechanical drawing into life-like painting. The handling of light, color contrasts, the use of soft and hard edges, and metaphorical and symbolic expression are subjective personal choices that often distinguish one artist from another. Human insight, spirit, creative spark, inspiration – it goes by many names – is the X factor that machines will never replicate.
Posted on 1/3/2018 7:09:18 PM
By Donald Fox
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Off Kilter
The January/February 2018 issue of Smithsonian magazine is subtitled “The Year That Shattered America” and focuses on the year 1968. This was an especially important year for me as I graduated from college and then entered graduate school that fall, but it also signaled a time of social awakening that for me and others is still controversial fifty years later. Many friends and family members, in particular those that thought in bumper sticker phrases, did not or could not understand my choice to declare myself a conscientious objector (as I had been a strong student ROTC leader in high school) and take on the government through the Selective Service System. I won, and I served my country, but I did it on my own terms through two and a half years of alternative service in a state hospital choosing to save lives rather than support taking them.
It was during that year that Martin Luther King, Jr, and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. There were massive anti-war demonstrations around the country (and had been for several years already) including student occupation of campus buildings and administrative offices on many college campuses. That year signaled significant movement in Black Power, the counter-culture, women’s empowerment, and civil rights. White supremacists were mainstream in some Southern states including my home state of North Carolina. The Beatles went on a meditation retreat in India. The American spy ship USS Pueblo was seized by North Korea, and it was eleven months before the crew was finally released though the ship was retained and turned into a public propaganda museum.
At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, my wife, whom I did not know at the time and who had traveled the world as a military brat, was tear-gassed by police along with thousands of anti-war demonstrators. On my birthday President Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act effectively banning discrimination in housing, the last of the civil rights laws he signed. Mid-year, Johnson also signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, a treaty still in effect today. The Paris peace talks were underway, and Richard Nixon was elected president in November with a less than one percent margin of the popular vote. Late in the year, Apollo 8 became the first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon and return to Earth.
The country was as divided then as it is now, and though the particulars have changed, many of the underlying issues are the same: race, inequality, abuse of power, government collusion and corruption, and political influence by big money. Just as today, there were leaders willing to fight the system although the best of them were untimely removed from the fight during that tumultuous decade.
There was schism within the art world as well. The decidedly apolitical abstract art movement explored several parallel tracks with abstract expressionism being the major force. Some artists generally within the Pop Art movement invoked social criticism and some political criticism by using anti-traditional means wedded to more traditional visual imagery. Robert Rauschenberg incorporated news and printed images into his collaged prints and combine works that joined painting with sculpture in pieces that created mini environments. Jasper Johns made use of strong American symbols like the flag, beer cans, and targets to simultaneously question basic artistic assumptions along with the culture from which his art sprung. Andy Warhol challenged consumerism and the commercial mindset with wry multiple images of consumer goods, currency, celebrities, and other cultural icons that seemed simplistic but were philosophically rich and complex through his clever use of metaphor, irony, and hyperbole.
The sixties came to an end and morphed into the seventies and subsequent decades, but as has often been noted, history tends to repeat itself. Issues that America has never successfully resolved are still stirring the cultural pot, and new technology that initially appeared to bring people together in ways never before possible now is being used to demean, criticize, and polarize. There are many lessons yet to be learned.
Posted on 1/2/2018
By Donald Fox
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We live in a world that is best appreciated by the senses. If there were no senses with which to access the world around us, our perception of existence would be very different from what we think we know. It is from this sensual perception of the world and our response to it that art derives. Art is the outward expression of our experience, and a way in which we can comment on – we could also say participate with or reimagine – the space that we occupy.
What if, though, the outer world were simply a projection on a blue screen much like in the movies? There is no reality other than the surrounding immediate space; everything else is a projection but of such high quality that we are convinced that the illusion is real. In effect, this was the status of painting for hundreds of years. Artists strived for perfection in rendering the world with paint on canvas, and the painting was considered a window on reality. Looking through the frame, the viewer could enter that virtual world that sometimes was filled with imaginary beings such as gods, nymphs, mythical beasts, and other creatures conjured from the artist’s inner vision. Regardless how fanciful, these creatures were given believability and credence, so lifelike were they rendered. They existed as possibilities within the painted space and within the mind’s eye. Gods were often depicted in human form or in some supernatural combination of human and beast. The most bizarre was equally plausible as the ordinary.
There is always an element of imaginative thought connected to perception, that operation of the brain that takes sensation and translates it into something meaningful for the mind to comprehend. Verifiable perception constitutes what is known as reality, a realm seemingly as infinite and variable as that other more slippery realm we call the imagination. One can seem as preposterous as the other. Scientists seek both the infinitely small and the infinitely large and even theorize multiple realities in the form of simultaneously existing universes. The imaginative world goes far beyond the alchemist’s attempt to transmute coarse matter into gold. Within that dream world anything is possible, a way of thinking also associated with spiritual perception.
A kind of tension exists among fact, imagination, perception, delusion, belief, illusion, and conviction – all part of perceptual possibility. Each of us makes decisions daily from a set of beliefs grounded in specific perceptions that have been influenced by many factors. Some beliefs have been chosen consciously and others absorbed from family, friends, culture, and personal experience. If each of us is creating a personal universe, then scientists are not wrong about multiple universes simultaneously existing. It is the overlapping of these worlds that gives infinite possibility to this moment and the next.
