From Cleansing the Palette, June 2009

Dr. Deborah B. Reeve posed this question in her June 2009 column, "Cleansing the Palette," from NAEA News:

"I want to know how you see it. I want to know how art influences the way you see your life – as an individual, as a professional art educator. How do you see art “working” on you? How does art influence the way you take in, and respond to, the experiences in your life?"

Comments

[Steve Herrmann]

Art is expression. The more passionately we express it, the better it communicates. It touches us and is understood emotionally, even physically and psychologically, faster than it is grasped intellectually. This sums up the power of art.

It gets me in touch with myself. It reawakens me to my humanity. It opens my eyes to the world around me and I see others. Through looking I gain an appreciation for the little things around me, and puts me in awe of the Creator. It brings me face to face with His reality, with is both extremely exciting and terrifying at the same time.

Art is a language with a vocabulary as deep as one’s imagination, it is visual poetry. It a manner of communicating in which “laws” can be “broken” or “kept” according to what one wants to say. The expression “rules of composition” is a misnomer. Art is often said to be “relative”, but I do not think this is accurate either. It communicates, perhaps on a very basic level. Therefore it is not relative. To emphacize this, it can easily cross cultural and linguistic boundaries. Of course this is not universally the case, but by and large, art can cross that line which opens communication where we are otherwise foreigners to one another.

I do not embrace it often enough. In this hurried life, one needs to get in touch with what is deeper, what words cannot express. Everyone can draw and express with art, it is the demeaning voices within that counter our desire to express through art. Our culture makes art difficult, even as it is a “visual culture.” I must make the effort, to break into the other realm of doing art, the R-Mode as Betty Edwards calls it, where the rest of the world goes away and one can feel the freedom and the release encountered in art. There is something spiritual in art. It must be experienced. It is too deep to explain. Too much is lost in the translation, if it were even possible.

Most of all, art puts me in touch with living as a human being. It is somewhere where I can lose myself in enjoyment and expression and problem solving. It builds self-confidence. Life and culture are the paints on our palette. The more deeply we experience life, the more we learn, the more people we know, the more we have to draw from when expressing as artists. The more we create, the more we appreciate what and who is around us.

We communicate. We express. We are -- when we create.

[Artsology]

Art and music bring a joy to everyday life, and when I remember this, it makes me seek out more art to include in my life. Art is a lot more than just paintings on a wall - one can find art in everyday life, whether it's the pattern of rain drops on a window, the stark contrast of 2 red cardinals flying past the green trees, or interesting cracks on a wall ... when one can stop in the midst of a busy day and find this art around oneself, it gives a boost to your own creativity.

[cheap maple story mesos]

Nice post. This post is different from what I read on most blog. And it have so many valuable things to learn. Thank you for your sharing!

[buy aion item]

Nice article.....I very much crazy about this......We are waiting your next article....