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            Art teaches us new ways of seeing and understanding the world around us. As a student of painting, I realize that I can learn from art continually in a variety of ways. When I observe with the eye of a painter, I do learn new things about the world around me. My observation is forced deeper than a casual glance that simply identifies objects or that may help me avoid stubbing a toe or walking into a door. I look at the physical manifestation of a scene and contemplate its assemblage of shapes, colors, textures, space, and marvel how the illumination of the scene links everything in what appears to be a wonderfully harmonious whole. It makes little difference that disparate elements may have nothing particular in common. Light spreads its unifying blanket, and I am privileged to be the eye that sees. Through seeing, I understand something that can be described as simple phenomenon – light on a surface – or, I can see with the mind as well and recognize a numinous glow. My imaginative leap takes me into a realm of symbol and metaphor. I begin to associate the images before me with memories, correspondences, and learned knowledge. As I shuffle the cards of experience, I know that I can draw a winning hand every single time.

            My skill as a painter, in my mind, depends on how I wed that immediate experience with the accumulated practice and knowledge that is the sum of my own historical journey through the learning process. Part of that process is informed by what I know of the history of art as a whole. Lessons I have learned from the past can deepen my experience of the present. The linear and aerial perspective discoveries of the Renaissance painters inform my understanding as I observe. Yet specific choices I may make for color, placement, or other interpretation can be entirely my own.

            I may consider the artists who so intently observed their world in order to better represent their artistic conceptions. I recognize certain 18^th/19^th century artists like Blake, Goya, or Fuseli beginning to shift their artistic gaze from external landscapes to the less explored internal landscapes where only a few intrepid souls like Bosch previously dared give life to. Closer to our time, recording the emotional response to a scene or idea may be more important to certain artists than the veracity of the scene itself. Eventually some artists do away with observation altogether as a starting point for painting and make the process more of an intellectual exercise, one that can be highly emotionally charged or not. The possibilities keep expanding.

            As is often the case, when something new is proposed, the old – at least for a time and maybe only for some – is considered no longer valid. Such is the rhetoric of change. Usually, though, if one watches long enough, the great pendulum of time swings back and the old is made new again. What I love about art is that allegiances don’t have to be forged with any particular interpretation. One can cultivate and appreciate innumerable varieties of experience, even those that are seemingly incompatible. All can be celebrated as part of the continuing evolution/revolution/elocution that is the history of artistic expression. As Einstein so eloquently observed, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”