There can be silence without sadness and contemplation without loss. Silence is not empty. It's not even quiet. It can be intensely alive with thoughts of the past, the pandemonium of the now, or questions of tomorrow.
Edward Hopper understood that place inside you that might seem empty—abandoned. His work is said to represent loneliness or isolation. I see it as our inner selves—the iron core of our existence.
That hidden room is the structure of our consciousness. It is a place of silence in the middle of our inventions and entertainment. Maybe it's simply a refuge where we can retreat inside ourselves when the hurricane winds and the noise of a thousand demands, or the ricochets of past traumas, blow in ever-rotating assault.
Eric Green paints silence. His images capture the melancholy of time passing. They challenge both perception and reality. He wants his images to "capture the transcendent beauty of being alive without redundancy."
His place of human solitude is not nature. It's not a lone mountaintop with one ancient bristlecone pine. It's not an unexplored cave of a million years of erosion with sculpted fantasy formations. It's not an uninhabited atoll in the Pacific. This is a human-made place and not one intended for silence.
With Thierry Guillemin, it’s not merely the appearance of the thing. He connects with something that is felt beyond the form. He looks closely at the inconspicuous and unremarkable fragments of our civilization: the things all around us. He is after that indefinable something: the vibrations of existence.
Yes, there is meaning in the great roar of silence—where the bellowing intentions of meaning echo inside you...touching the fleeting moment that could reveal the sense of it all. But that empty, maybe abandoned place is where you can find calm—the calm of a mountaintop that is accessible by the sharpened awareness that comes with PTSD.
For many artists, the structures placed in the hurried rush of civilization give us the the X-rays of empire—the bones of society. It is ultimately the place where silence thrives.
I am struck by your reference to "the sharpened awareness that comes with PTSD." I have a son on the autism spectrum and there is a growing sense that what the world sees as the deficits of neurodivergent people can sometimes come with exceeding strengths. For example, the young climate change activist Greta Thunberg tweeted, "I have Aspergers and that means I’m sometimes a bit different from the norm. And - given the right circumstances- being different is a superpower." Perhaps we need to think more about the "superpowers" that people with PTSD might have that are less available to others.
Visual art is the only art that can capture pure silence. Of course most of it does not, but it is possible. I find that worth pursuing.