Art is an imitation, as Aristotle says in the Poetics, but an imitation of what? One might think that a drawing or a painting is an imitation of what we see.
And that is true, but what we see is not just what registers on our retina. There is an experience connected with seeing, without which "seeing" means nothing to us. The experience of "seeing" is drawn from the collective sense, from smell and touch, from all the senses operating under a certain condition at a certain time.
I can draw a picture of a house, but unless I can hint at the experience of standing there in the pouring rain staring despondently at a locked gate, I have not produced art. The cold wind, the dampness of the air, and the sinking feeling of mistakenness (or of the victim) are all present in the experience and somehow have to be expressed by pencil or brush strokes.
An atmosphere can be created by using emphasis and texture to provoke memories of certain experiences. Bold, contrasting strokes and washed out colors often evoke the feeling of hard light and heat at high noon. Smudges and pastels evoke the feeling of staring down a valley in a drifting mist.
These are the kind of things that go to make art. It's an imitation of what the whole man sees, not just the eye, and sticks in your memory like an experience does.
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
2 comments:
You know what man, it's been ages since I strolled around the blogging world and read your stuff. Congrats on finishing.I'm still contemplating on going to TAC, most likely after I finish my first degree. Yeah, already considering digging deeper the hole of my impending debt. Anyway, may I ask what you plan to do now? After immersing yourself in classical literature, bleeding lead and all that jazz, how do you think/plan on following your vocation, if I may ask?
-Remey
oh gosh. Well plan A is: find a place to live in the area, and get a job w/an architect or landscape designer for a year, so I can get experience before heading off to grad school in architecture. Probably U of Oregon or Notre Dame. I'm not 100% sure I want to do that, instead of following boyhood dream of flying airplanes for a living, but airplanes are impractical and somehow joining the Air Force doesn't appeal to me.
I highly recommend you dig your hole deeper and come to TAC. I don't know how to express this properly, but you get far more education than the $25,000 a year you pay for. It's hard but worth it. And you're previous schooling experience will place it in perspective which makes it even better.
Post a Comment