Are You Not Moved?

Memory of what passed for art education in my early years comes back in snippets . . . . dark museums, large framed paintings of fat women, storm clouds, and angels . . . . words like Rubenesque . . . . “Hey, you, listen up, this is important.” Oh, great, more homework and a quiz.

Maybe we were invited to not overthink but to just feel art. I recall being drawn to the story told by, say, a Noman Rockwell cover of the Saturday Evening Post or maybe to the serenity of “Summer’s Heritage,” only to be told that Robert Kinkade’s work was kitschy. It was then I wrote myself off as some sort of a lowbrow philistine.

And so we are gathered with all levels of sophistication to share how our relationship with the fine arts – certainly painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry; maybe dance, literature – has been shaped by our life experience. To what extent has art, in whatever form, tapped into our soul with something so moving that it actually bypasses the intellectual process and evokes in us a visceral response?

We might start by just looking at Van Gogh’s “Night Cafe’” (shown above). What, if anything, does the painting communicate to you? Perhaps it comes across as simply some dreary-looking place featuring a guy, without legs, dressed in white.

Only then take a look at this short readable essay (Gonzo Painting: Julian Bell on Van Gogh's "Night Cafe'" ). Did you then get a peek at the artist’s tortured imagination and the way the piece depicts “a place where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes” and experience “the terrible human passions with the red and the green”? Or maybe not. We are thereby invited to ask the question posed in the essay, whether art is primarily a vehicle for the artist's self-expression. Or, to flip the question, what is expected of the viewer to “get it”

Other forms of the fine arts may be more viscerally self-evident. Member Monday (10/30/17) Music’s Evocative Magic addressed the power of music to transcend time, place, and age by encoding emotion with its own universal language as it interacts directly with the limbic system (linked, here again, enjoy Toddler Reacts to Moonlight Sonata).

We have the talent pool right here within our group to help guide us in such questions applied throughout the fine art spectrum e.g. sculpture (Giuseppe), music (Oak), architecture (Dominique), painting (Shannon), dance (Marlena). With the club so immersed in fine art, maybe all we need to do at this stage in our lives is to simply learn how to relax into it and enjoy the experience. No quizzes.