I’ve heard many people say that they like abstract art. They hang it up on the wall, and it adds a splash of color to the room. You can get a little bit out of it – but, to me, it’s like comparing jazz music with a powerful ballad. When someone is singing their heart out, telling a story, there is far greater impact than just a snappy tune. The power is in the narrative – the ability to capture the mind and tell a story. A story that touches the soul, as well as the mind.I’ve been entranced with a new book entitled The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. I would highly encourage everyone to read this book. The author, Dennis Dutton, a great academic thinker from New Zealand, has a philosophy that so closely mirrors my own. Dutton maintains that humans, cross-culturally, have a fundamental need to be reaffirmed about places that are safe and comfortable – he calls this the “landscape of longing”. Around the world, from the Far East, to South America, to Canada, North America, Eastern Europe – universally, these cultures long for visual landscapes that bring them to a place of comfort and peace. Landscapes that include the comfort of water, and leafing trees providing shade. Mountains that give you something to look out on, trails to attract the eye - places of peace, places of sanctuary.
I’ve never tried to maintain that my paintings are realistic – if I wanted them to be real I would have been a photographer. My paintings are fantasies, an oasis of the mind, an answer to the longing of the human heart for sanctuary. If you, too, are an artist, take this into mind when you create – it’s not just about you and what you want to express, it’s about what you can give to your viewer. I call it “socially-conscious art”. Art that portrays something that is better than reality, something to aspire to.
There’s enough chaos in the world – we don’t need to glorify in our art.
