Does Art Need to be Understood In Order to be Appreciated?
And How Should I Approach Abstraction?
Grounded in the Reality of Nature as shown at left? From Meditation, as an ethereal form of expressing the expansive energetic world of the Spiritual? Or merely as a means of Self Expression, found extemporaneously from exploring the inner landscape of inclinations towards one’s own self expression of color and form? Part of approaching Art through one’s own lens poses questions about what one wants to say and how. And in doing so may say something about what one sees, allowing you to learn a little more about yourself.
“In Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), Wassily Kandinsky eloquently reprises the Symbolist idea that form can be equivalent for feeling. O’Keeffe was exploring the same concept when she produced her charcoals… The charcoals forecast her career-long love of organic shapes, close-up viewpoints and contours…” From the book Georgica O’Keeffe by Randall Griffin.
In my conversation about this topic, I showed him a half dozen photos from my library, taken in the desert that also ground abstraction as an experience found often while exploring the elements of Nature. (Shown above.) We are surrounded by Abstraction - a sort not defined by imagination or feeling but simply showing the way the Universe is composed. The new Web telescope is producing a number of images of highly colorful amorphous ethereal stories deep in the Universe that liken abstract art with swirls and clouds and prismatic color.
The imagination can also produce colors and shapes when channeled through the hand holding a tool. Instinct can drive creation which then may provoke experience often tied to emotion for the viewer. The active pragmatic mind, so keen on understanding, controlling and strategizing (very yang) can get lost for a few minutes in the yin experience of an abstract image, creating a bypass experience which may be deeply relaxing. Very Zen.
In addition, Art can be used as a therapeutic tool for processing held trauma - repetitive thinking patterns embedded with emotion. These create a personal labyrinth that continually leads back to the beginning with out an exit point. In Yoga, these are called samscaras. The use of art tools can bring out held material from the subconscious in to the world to be viewed, understood and transformed, transcended. This often leads to a Spiritual Awakening bringing the limited mind out of its held perspective in reality to a much broader experience, anew. And in this process, as the expansion continues, greater, wider, deeper levels of reality may be unveiled with an Ego healthy enough to open up beyond held fears and anxieties.
And in this exploratory process, in one’s imagination, moving from left brain to right, a type of meditation may set in changing the brain waves to a more relaxing Theta (often used by an energetic Healer). And this transitory state may access other worldly experiences that are part of Reality but on a different level but true nonetheless. Imagination tends to roam free there. Is there something to be accessed, learned or felt by the viewer by being transported to this otherworldly place? Allowing them to move through unchartered aspects of Self?
