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Posted on 6/28/2024 4:39:10 PM
By Donald Fox
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Pandora's Window Box
Today is International LGBT Pride Day, and I celebrate that diversity within the larger artistic community. Historically, some of the greatest artists of the past and present have been or are gay. They have contributed to and supported the development of the arts through the ages as much as, if not more than, artists of any other group or persuasion. For these contributions to beautifying and enriching the world, I am grateful, and for my gay friends and acquaintances I am also grateful.
It is fitting that the Pride Flag is a rainbow of colors, which for painters is also the color wheel composed of the primary and secondary colors. The secondaries of course are derived from the primaries, and these colors in nature are most familiar to non-artists as the rainbow that often appears after a storm. For the visual artist, those colors are everywhere, blended into the incredible array of objects and light that is ever-present from the drama of a sunrise or sunset to the subtlety of warm and cool grays seen in clouds, rocks, and shadows.
The gardens that grow upon this earth are variegated in many hues. We pick the flowers that we like. Some are fragrant, and some are not, but each is unique in form and combined with others may glow more radiant than in solitary splendor. With open eyes and open hearts may we recognize the deeper beauty beneath the surface color.
Posted on 6/26/2024 12:52:20 PM
By Donald Fox
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Infinity Window
Time is the one commodity that once spent is gone forever. There is no investment, no way to increase a return or to gain any return on time itself. Yet, time also seems malleable, for through memory we seem able to stretch the effects of time, to revisit places and people once known and make the live again.
Being time-bound beings, we see the effects of the passage of time both positive and negative. Applied skills improve over time, plants and animals grow over time, civilizations arise over time, and artistic expression matures with time and energy invested. Of course, all these things and more decline given enough time. Increase, growth, accumulation, strength, and mental acuity all degrade or dwindle as time passes. This we perceive and accept as the nature of things temporal.
Some have said that there is only one first time. At the most obvious level that is true, but we can also experience something anew for the second or third or fourth or however many times we choose. What matters is that there is choice. Any first-time experience also depends upon prior knowledge and experience brought to the occasion. Something has to be perceived to be known.
The experience of art, for example, is enriched by whatever previous experience one has of art generally even if not of a specific piece or artist. Prior knowledge creates expectation and context, but lack of knowledge need not reduce an aesthetic experience. The sensitive and inquisitive audience will be receptive to the experience and will create context as the encounter unfolds.
A dancer responding to a new piece of music will create a dance different from all previous dances even when moves or rhythms are ones used before. A second performance to the same music will evoke a variation rather than a repeat of the same dance. The music is the same, but the dancer is now different. Time is an echo of all past dance. Art is the echo of the creative self within the chamber of auto-renewal.
