Appreciating art starts with appreciating the artist. Here's why I think that.
Yesterday I went 90 miles south to the East Neuk village of Pittenweem. Every year in August they have an Art Festival for local and guest artists. The exhibit venue's range from established artists to glad amateurs to accomplished hobbyists. The styles vary from abstract to landscape from oil, water to mixed media, photography and textile. The whole place buzzes for 9 days.
Two of the artists are personal friends, and the Arts Festival is both reason and excuse for catching up with life stories and nourishing one of the finest forms of human art, friendship patiently worked at and faithfully expressed.
It's an extraordinary way to spend a day, wandering around the historic fishing village, in and out of people's garages, living rooms, gardens and sheds, browsing through thousands of works of art some of which may have taken weeks, certainly many hours to create. When you find an artist whose work you like, it's easy to compliment, converse and explore with them what it is about their art that moves them to paint, draw, sculpt, throw clay (as in pottery!), weave and photograph. What about the art which perplexes, or is a turn-off, or even seems hardly art at all? How do you say that? Or more constructively, how start the kind of conversation that might help you understand what the artist is getting at, what the painting is about, or seeking to express or represent, or more delicately, what am I to like about not only the painting but the human experience and this human artist who is its creator?
So yesterday was a day of looking and trying to see, of talking and trying to listen, of paying attention and trying to appreciate, and of making a serious attempt now and again to seek access to the human mind and heart that given time and materials, produces through skill, toil, imagination and discipline, this particular piece of art? And strange combinations of emotions swirl around. You look, pay attention, try to understand and appreciate the art, and the artist seems distant, or off-hand, or anxious for you to like it, or takes pleasure in your pleasure. Some artists smile from the corner while doing sodoku, or on their Tablet, one or two with easel and brush filling the unforgiving minute. You see the one you would seriously think of buying, but it already has a sold red sticker on it. Walking into a venue you know right away it's not 'your thing', but to turn and walk out on an artist's year's work would be an act of emotional sabotage.
All of this makes me aware of what goes on in all the daily transactions and interactions with all kinds of people with whom we form relationships in social interaction, from the friendly hello to the long conversation, from the relationships we negotiate at work to family dynamics, from casual informality to long established intimacy. The way we walk in and out of each other's lives, view what their life is like so far as we can see or understand, learn something of who they are by their behaviour and a character which is an art form in progress. Trying to understand what someone is working so hard to achieve in life, what it is they are making of the raw materials they have been given, the importance of appreciating what we don't always understand, and recognising the personal investment of identity and life vision that has gone into the making of this, particular, here and now person whom I meet as a you in relation to me.
There is a vulnerability in being an artist who puts their art into an exhibition, and whose prices reflects the value they put on their art. It is part of the required courtesy of the exhibition that the viewer respects, seeks to understand, tempers criticism with appreciation, remembering that the art being evaluated or admired, has its source in the deeply human and profoundly personal. In all those encounters with other people every day, there is something of the same significance that should take place; a required courtesy, seeking to understand this other person, and seeing the person they are as a work in progress being formed from the given materials of circumstance and experience, gift and genes, inspiration and choice - and these have their source in the deeply human and the profoundly personal.
Now if all this sounds too serious, it can be lightened by other realities from yesterday. Like a vanilla ice cream in a chocolate oyster, Masala black Thai tea and a lemon and cinnamon crepe, and a tea tray sized pizza with a special friend before the journey home. Now that pizza was, a work of art.
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