Art floats. It expands and contracts and can take on the appearance of reality and then float away as you try to capture and define it
Other elements can appear and you get a fuller grasp of an artist’s visual ideas. Child-like figures can move in ways that complete an ever-changing composition that stirs and provokes. You begin to see a lot more if you watch it.
Repeated motifs and color harmonies can keep your eye moving among the dominating shapes. You know there are meanings and messages just out of reach... hovering beyond the horizon of complete understanding.
A painting is more than a celebration of pigments. It ‘s a storage bin of thoughts, observations, stirred up memories and emotions: inside the psyche stuff. Art that touches a deep humanity is much more than a canvas for sale.
Art may lie still for years – even centuries waiting for you to look at it. But just stand where the artist stood and it may begin to move—to expand and contract—and float once again. It can be the ideology of a culture or a religion...or just life passing by. There is a place where you can find solitude and solace. Hope leaps into the gap between the artist and the work itself: the creation of shelter from the crushing pressures of the world outside.
Today we are in the winds of transformation. Sometimes stability floats out of reach. PTSD and its turmoil can drape over us like a shroud. But courage floats also. Acceptance, confidence, pride—they all float together, struggling to overcome the darkness that lurks below.
I loved the Gauguin painting, and the last one was fascinating to look at with all that is going on the two sides of the painting contrasted with the almost still center of it. But the boat is going the wrong way!