Final Draft of my Writing in Community Essay

                                                                  Learning to love art

    How often do you visit art galleries and museums? Unless you study studio art or art history, it is quite likely that your answer will be either 'not often' or 'almost never.' My answer is the same; unless I have been told to visit the Met or the MoMa as part of a school assignment, I almost never go. The major reasons why this is the case are twofold: first, neither you nor I have the time to spare, and second, we don't consider ourselves 'art people.' Because we don't know the language of paintings very well, we feel that there is little benefit for us to be hanging around art galleries. But the fact is, there is no such thing as an art person; we are all 'art people.' Whether or not we know the various languages of art, we resonate emotionally with certain songs, photos and movies. We share a common desire to both appreciate and to create art, but we often have difficulty seeing the visions offered by paintings. We must learn how to train our eyes to see the paintings, and to train our brains to make sense of them.

    I was recently given the opportunity to train my eyes and brain, thanks to a school assignment asking me to fall in love with a painting, and then describe it to someone who had never seen it before. I had already fallen in love with a certain painting, The Harbor of Dieppe by J.M.W. Turner, but I needed to take a second, long, look at it in order to describe it properly. The fleet of merchant ships is majestic; tall sails, large hulls, and cargo from faraway lands.The paints are extremely bright; lead white, yellows, mediterranean blues, with a smattering of blacks and browns. There is activity everywhere you look, with lots of people coming and going, but one is never quite able to make out their facial expressions. At the end of this assignment, I had to ask myself "Why do I like this?" I knew I liked that painting more than any others I'd seen at the Frick collection, but even a second, long, look was not enough for me to find any drama in the scene, and I'd been lead to believe that all paintings have to tell a story. It took me awhile to realize that, in fact, there was no drama at all.

    Any work of art is a form of communication, wherein the viewer attempts to unpack the art itself, so that he might see it as its creator saw it. This can be a difficult task, especially when it is not immediately apparent what the point of the painting is. Mark Doty, writing in Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, contemplates the raison d'etre of still life paintings. Although he acknowledges that they contain neither drama nor subjects that convey meaning, Doty still finds meaning within still lives, for he believes that they portray a particular vision.

     First, a principle of attention, simply that. A faith that if we look and look we will be

surprised and we will be rewarded.

    Then, a faith in the capacity of the object to carry meaning, to serve as a vessel. For

what? Ourselves, of course. I mean that the objects depicted are, ultimately, soulful, are

anything but lifeless. Of course they have lost their particular contexts, all the stuff of narrative, the attached human stories that would have placed them in some specific relation to a life, but they are nonetheless full of that life, suffused with intimacy (48).

Still lives are paintings that lack everything we normally associate with paintings; context, narrative, and story. Yet, according to Doty, they are anything but lifeless; their vision is one of attention, or said another way, of contemplation. It is this vision of contemplation that gives these paintings both life and intimacy to their viewers. Still lives are a way in which one may project his or her thoughts and emotions onto the painting, without being interrupted by a story or a subject of the painter's choosing. Because there is no context or narrative, they reflect only the consciousness of the viewer by using mundane objects as a focal point for meditation. If one can meditate using still life, why can't the same be said for other paintings? They, too, were painted out of a belief that they could carry meaning, and operate on a 'principle of attention.' Artists are separated from their viewers by factors of time, space and cultural differences, but their creations are built to withstand these factors. If viewers can see a painting's vision as its artist intended, then they can use the unique qualities of that vision to better understand other works by the same artist. Once viewers can identify one artist's vision, then they will have a point of reference when looking at the works of his contemporaries. 

For me, “The Harbor of Dieppe” was both a focal point for meditation, and an exercise in vision. The memories and feelings it evokes are powerful, from my senior trip to Paris, where I finally returned to the birthplace of my ancestors, to my second date with my girlfriend, where we went to the Frick collection and I first saw “Dieppe”. Remembering these events helped put the last two years of my life in context, as I had previously been struggling with making sense of it all. Turner’s vision in this work is similar to that of his contemporaries, including Gustave Courbet’s “The Stone breakers” and Theodore Gericault’s “The Raft of the Medusa,” in that they all use brighter palates than one sees in Baroque paintings. However, Turner’s painting differs in that it is almost unnaturally bright in comparison to the others, and, because it uses less lines and shadows, is more ‘fluid’ than both Courbet’s and Gericault’s works.  

    The ability to identify commonalities and differences between artists is an essential skill that, like a muscle, must be trained in order to work properly. Categorization is a fundamental aspect of humanity, and once you perfect it in one discipline, you can learn more quickly how to do it in others. But If staring at paintings can aid this process, why don’t more people do it? Perhaps they feel that they do not know enough about the medium, and at the risk of not understanding a work, of not 'getting' it, they prefer to stick to the films and photos they are familiar/comfortable with. Jeannette Winterson, a journalist and science fiction writer, was an example of someone with this mindset; she had little interest in the visual arts because of her background in literature. This changed when she stumbled across an oil painting in Amsterdam that so moved her that she fled to a nearby bookshop, sat down, and wept. When she realized that her distress was due to ignorance, Winterson resolved to educate herself, reading every art critic from John Ruskin to Michael Levey, and focusing her visual education on modern painters. Although this did not turn her into an art expert, she succeeded in her goal to change her emotional connection to art. She writes:

I still know far far less about pictures than I do about books and this will not change. What has changed is my way of seeing I am learning how to look atpictures. What has changed is my capacity of feeling. Art opens the heart.

(46-7)

Winterson’s area of expertise was always books, and she knew that. Her aim was not to gain encyclopedic knowledge of famous paintings, but rather to change how she looked at pictures - any and all pictures - to better ‘open the heart.’ But surely her heart was as open as anyone else’s. It can’t be that ignorance of art could actually hurt us in any way... could it? Winterson affirms that, in fact, it does:

In the west, we avoid painful encounters with art by trivialising it, or by familiarising it. Our present obsession with the past has the double advantage of making new work seem raw and rough compared to the cosy patina of tradition, whilst refusing tradition its vital connection to what is happening now. By making islands of separation out of the unbreakable chain of human creativity, we are able to set up false comparisons, false expectations, all the while lamenting that the music, poetry, painting, prose, performance art of Now, fails to live up to the art of Then, which is why, we say, it does not affect us. In fact, we are no more moved by a past we are busy inventing, than by a present we are busy denying. If you love a Cezanne, you can love a Hockney, can love a Boyd, can love a Rao. If you love a Cezanne rather than lip-service it.

                                (51)

Comparing works of the past with works of the present is not a valid reason not to explore modern art. If one truly loves impressionist painters, who are currently the gold standard for Canon art, one has the capacity to love modern painters like Pollock or Warhol. This is not to say that one has to force themselves to like a specific painting or artist, but to understand the present, one must attune themselves to the art that is being made now. The problem is that much of the difficulty of getting people to like art, any art, is because most people have had little to no prior exposure. Given that Winterson’s case is the exception, rather than the rule, how might we lure the layman into art galleries and museums? 

Perhaps the key lies in showing people that appreciating art is a matter of attention, rather than formal education. The commonality between Winterson (pre- 'awakening') and others who are apprehensive about art is the knowledge that, like any form of love, falling in love with art takes time. This is why people will often say they 'have no time for art'; the time commitment prevents novices from fully appreciating a Titian, a Rembrandt, or a Van Gogh. Even those who take the time to visit an art gallery or a museum feel that they don't spend enough time to justify the excursion. As Winterson explains, it is not entirely their fault.

Art takes time. To spend an hour looking at a painting is difficult. The public gallery experience is one that encourages art at a trot. There are the paintings, the marvellous speaking works, definite, independent, each with a Self it would be impossible to ignore, if... if... it were possible to see it. I do not only mean the crowds and guards and the low lights and the ropes, which make me think of freak shows, I mean the thick curtain of irrelevancies that screens the painting from the viewer... Is the painting authority? Does the guide-book tell us that it is part of The Canon? If Yes, then half of the viewers will admire it on principle, while the other half will dismiss it on principle (47)."

It is an endless barrage of distractions, says Winterson, that keeps us from truly seeing a painting, from knowledge of its purchase price to whether or not it is part of The Canon. If we are going to spend any time at all looking at paintings, we had better be prepared to focus on the images that catch our eye. All of the background noise, the curators, the other viewers, and the guide books, must be tuned out so that our paintings may be the sole recipient of our attention. But to spend time with an artwork does not imply that you have to pursue a Ph.D in studio art or art criticism. Quite the opposite, in fact: it means that to approach art, as a novice, requires  self-education outside of any classroom. Looking at different paintings, and learning how to see them, is a good place to start. Reading about different art movements and the artists that contributed to them is another. The extent to which one will pursue this education is up to the individual, but to those who complain that they don’t have time to pursue it, “the time, like the money, can be found (48).” If one is serious about learning how to appreciate art, they will make time for it and come up with the money to pay for it. 

The only prerequisite to learning is approaching the material with an open mind. But Going about anything with an open mind is easier said than done. Art can often appear to require an expert's knowledge to understand, and although asking an expert about an artist or an art movement may yield the desired information, it does little to further one’s understanding of the big picture. The dilemma shared by consumers, tourists, and sightseers is that they all use - are exposed to things - without understanding them. Walker Percy explores this theme in his essay “The Loss of the Creature”, arguing that there are two broadly-defined types of people; experts, who reign sovereign over a particular realm of knowledge, and consumers, who have no access to that knowledge other than through use, and the use of a thing does not equal ownership. Experts can be scientists, literary or art critics, engineers or businessmen; they all enjoy exclusivity by merit of the specialization of their trade. According to Percy, the result of this specialization is the total, voluntary, surrender of sovereignty over everything but one’s own domain of knowledge.

This loss of sovereignty is not a marginal process, as might appear from my example of estranged sightseers. It is a generalized surrender of the horizon to those experts within whose competence a particular segment of the horizon is thought to lie (5).

According to Percy, specialization causes people to have the incorrect mindset that they should, or perhaps even must, surrender their sovereignty over parts of their lives. This means that, for many people, the effort of exposing oneself to art and trying to appreciate it is futile; they believe that the major ‘questions’ posed by art have already been answered, and that the unresolved questions are the sole responsibility of people within the ‘art world.’ Again, we come back to this notion that there is such a thing as an ‘art world’, or a ‘science world’, or a ‘literature world.’ Specialization is important, yes, and it is often necessary to advance further discoveries in fields, such as biology and chemistry, that have reached maturation. However, the fact that experts exist does not exclude the layman from participating; if anything, the layman who delves into an unfamiliar topic may gain a new perspective on what he already knows. Like Jeannette Winterson, the layman who does this will then be able to create something entirely new.

    Walker Percy offers a solution to the issue of people surrendering their sovereignty, as a way of enabling them to regain control of their lives. He calls the solution ‘recovery’, and it applies whenever someone is forced to approach something completely unfamiliar to them. According to Percy, recovery is necessary in education because the nature of formal learning causes most students to passively absorb their lessons, rather than actively engaging with them. By doing so, these students have surrendered their sovereignty over their education. Percy outlines three general avenues to recovery; first by ordeal, wherein a student seizes the lesson by force, second by learning from a “great man” who can make even the most uninterested student passionate about their field, and third by catastrophe - by exploding a bomb, which will make a student truly ‘see’ their lesson for the first time. 

But since neither of these methods of recovering... is pedagogically feasible-perhaps the great man even less so than the Bomb-I wish to propose the following educational technique which should prove equally effective for Harvard and Shreveport High School. I propose that English poetry and biology should be taught as usual, but that at irregular intervals, poetry students should find dogfishes on their desks and biology students should find Shakespeare sonnets on their dissecting boards (7).

The great man is an expert within his field, so willing and able to teach others that whomever he shares his knowledge with, he also imparts his passion for the subject to them. The Bomb is an accidental recovery; when a bomb goes off in the biology laboratory, then the student may see the dogfish in its entirety for the first time. The dogfish is no longer a specimen, but an individual being, belonging in its own unique habitat rather than on the dissecting tray in a lab. Because the bomb and the great man are both (usually) impractical, the alternative is a different type of ‘shock’; having students walk into their classes expecting one thing, and experiencing another. By doing so, the lesson is taken out of its package; learning about the anatomy of a dogfish is no longer confined to the domain of “science”, and Shakespeare’s sonnets are no longer relegated to the realm of “literature.”

This may be feasible in the context of art education. Rather than being placed in its usual ‘packaging’ (to use a term of Percy’s) of an art history classroom, a museum or a gallery, a painting may be displayed in a mathematics class as a study in geometry, or perhaps fractals or integration. It may also be displayed in a history class, as an illustration of the zeitgeist of the era being taught, or even in a chemistry class - with the focus of the lesson being on the chemical composition of the various paints and varnishes used. Presenting a painting out of context is perhaps the best way to show an otherwise uninterested student - or layman - how to fall in love with it. If the layman experiences the painting in a language he understands, he will be encouraged to investigate it further.     

    This proposal, to encourage an intellectual awakening in the masses, would be a massive project indeed. However, the project is necessary; many of us, due to the consumer culture we live in, have been lead to believe that satisfaction comes from what we consume. These people can be controlled by their spending habits, from what they eat to what they wear, and even to whom they vote for. This is the warning given by Walker Percy in the last paragraphs of “The Loss of the Creature”; that refusing to educate oneself leads to mental enslavement. 

The layman will be seduced as long as he regards beings as consumer items to be experienced rather than prizes to be won, and as long as he waives his sovereign rights as a person and accepts his role of consumer as the highest estate to which the layman can aspire

… the person is not something one can study and provide for; he is something one struggles for. But unless he also struggles for himself, unless he knows that there is a struggle, he is going to be just what the planners think he is (cite).

One’s humanity comes from his mastery, his sovereignty, over his domain. Therefore, anything that removes his sovereignty also removes his humanity. This is why consumerism is so dangerous; it takes away the personhood, the uniqueness, inherent in all people, and homogenizes them. Intellectualism, over multiple disciplines, is the only way to combat this force. If this is the case, how can one turn the layman into an intellectual? One approach is through art; art is accessible to anyone and everyone, regardless of culture, religion, ethnicity or personal history. The desire to create and experience art is a drive that exists in all humans, and by encouraging it, one may help others to recover their individuality. Their individuality is expressed not only in how they approach art (from the perspectives of sculpture, painting, literature or music, to name a few), but also in what their approach entails. There is a niche for everyone within the domain of art, and it begs to be filled.

I experienced this encouragement when I was asked to research my painting. I had been given a chance to answer some lingering questions, among them being the origins of Turner's unique painting style (it is rather unlike Gericault, eschewing lines, forms and chiaroscuro), and the reason(s) why "Dieppe" was painted. I learned that Turner was not just an oil painter; his main artistic focus was watercolors, and he painted four times as many watercolor paintings than oil paintings. I also learned where Turner learned how to make daylight shine on the water in a photorealistic manner; he borrowed the technique from 17th-century painter Claude Lorrain, whom he emulated in his early career. Although my research did not fully explain the painting, it did give me a better sense of the continuity between past and present in paintings. 

Just as I have hobbies and interests in video games, music, and reading scientific journals, I can take time to find a few more paintings like Dieppe. I can visit them wherever they are housed, spend the afternoon with them, and have a silent conversation with them whenever time permits. I may look them up on Wikipedia, or look in Modern Painters to see if Ruskin has anything to say about them, but I do not need formal classes - much less a career in art - in order to appreciate them. As to how one may best learn about art, to quote Winterson's ex-boyfriend, it is the same as learning about wine:

"Drink it (56)."

Works Cited:

Doty, Mark. Still life with oysters and lemon. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. Print.

Percy, Walker. "The Loss of the Creature." www.udel.edu. University of Delaware , n.d. Web. 5 Mar. 2013. <www.udel.edu/anthro/ackerman/loss_creature.pdf>.

Winterson, Jeanette. Art objects: essays on ecstasy and effrontery. New York: Alfred A. Knopf :, 1996. Print.