D’arts
2021 04 11 | journal
I look back sometimes at the evolution of my taste in art and wonder what it was that drove me to enjoy Impressionism, because I don't really enjoy it now. I don't dislike it, it simply does nothing much for me, as is the case for a lot of representational art.
All art is abstract really. The pipe is never a pipe. There is representational art and non-representational art. There are paintings that look like a thing, some that look excruciatingly like a thing, and those that look nothing like anything and you have to, yourself, make a thing if you're so inclined to. But you don't have to. That is the difficulty a lot of folk have with some forms of modern art, are the paintings that don't look like a thing, so they don't understand what the point is. The point is to enjoy what you see, or appreciate it at least, in and of itself. Enjoy the colours, or the patterns, or the way things flow.
For a long time I felt a disconnect from representational art. The more "real" it was, the less I liked it, the less I could feel about it. Truly representational art of the landscape variety, of the portrait variety, for example, doesn't do a damn thing for me. There is nothing in it that captures my interest. (Which is not to say I don't still love the way Caravaggio captured light in some of his pieces, because there's nothing that quite touches that beauty.) The more something verged from the "real", the more I could find in it, the more emotion I could feel from it, and the more personal things felt to me. I look at a painting of some random street in some random town, something somewhat photo real, and I don't feel anything from the artist. I think that widely abstracted representational art speaks more to me because it very directly and explicitly shows the involvement of the artist. The depictions in an abstract piece are very deliberate and speak of choice. The colours used, the simplicity or complication of the abstraction, the distinctness or indistinctness of the shapes and forms, their positions, their interplay. So, if I stand in front of one of Morrissseau's Man Changing Into Thunderbird paintings, there is more there to see, for me, than looking at a Turner landscape.
I don't much feel anything about Rothko's work either, I certainly don't like them. But, after many years of them, I finally came to a point where I could see something in them to appreciate. They aren't entirely unlike looking out a fogged or frosted window at whatever lays beyond - colourful and present, but indistinct.
What's there to appreciate about a piece is sometimes how it was made more than what it shows when it's done. Sometimes the process is everything. Like when I finally figured out how sudoku were solved I completely lost interest in them. The question I had was answered.