White on white

I was having dinner with a friend in a little spanish terrace about two years ago.

We were initially talking about adrenaline, work, the summer and then out of the blue he asked me a question that has stayed with me until today.

“Could you please explain to me why a person can cry in front of a painting or a piece of art?, are you born with this sensitivity,  or is this a learned behavior, is it taught?.

In the most humble attempt to try to answer this question, I told him that at least for me there are clearly certain things that move me or excite me, that deep down it all comes down to how it makes you feel. Though I have to admit that ever since I started studying and finding out more of the historical background of the work and  the lives  and inspirations of the artists it gives the pieces a broader depth and power.

Then, I thought of my grandmother and  we’ve developed very sweet conversations on the phone (we are old school, no skype) , where she  asks me about what I am doing in the university, she enjoys hearing stories about the things I see, the people I meet, why I do what I do and asks a lot of questions.

When I visit, I love showing her my friend’s work , photos of things I saw in museums and hearing what she thinks about the pieces, sometimes she just laughs but other times she usually starts the  sentence with  ” This reminds me of…” and associates it with her own life.

Which brings me to the answer of how I would answer the  question today. It all  comes down to  have the desire and curiosity to truly observe and keep asking questions, art conveys individual emotions but you have to be willing to be in the receiving part.

Like I said this was two years ago, ever since from time to time I have asked a few of my teachers and friends this question as well and it leads to very interesting conversations.

What do you think?

Today I leave you with a painting by Kazimir Malevich which he considered “the supremacy of pure feeling.”

“Only when the habit of one’s consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, Madonna’s and shameless nudes.. ..has disappeared, shall we see a pure painting composition. I have transformed myself into the nullity of forms and pulled myself out of the circle of things, out of the circle-horizon in which the artist and forms of nature are locked.”

• as quoted in: Marc Chagall, – a Biography, Sidney Alexander, Cassell, London, 1978, p. 178

Jean Dubuffet

                     

                    

                                                                       Apartment houses ,Paris, 1946

I have always directed my attempts at the figurative representation of objects by way of summary and not very descriptive brushstrokes, diverging greatly from the real objective measurements of things, and this has led many people to talk about childish drawing…this position of seeing them (the objects, fh) without looking at them too much, without focussing more attention on them than any ordinary man would in normal everyday life..

   

         

Character, 1944

People have seen that I intend to sweep away everything we have been taught to consider – without question – as grace and beauty; but have overlooked my work to substitute a vaster beauty, touching all objects and beings, not excluding the most despised – and because of that, all the more exhilarating….

I would like people to look at my work as an enterprise for the rehabilitation of scorned values, and, in any case, make no mistake, a work of ardent celebration….

I am convinced that any table can be for each of us a landscape as inexhaustible as the whole Andes range… I am struck by the high value, for a man, of a simple permanent fact, like the miserable vista on which the window of his room opens daily, that comes, with the passing of time, to have an important role in his life. I often think that the highest destination at which a work of art can aim is to take on that function in someone’s life.

                                   

 A little secret that I have sought for a long time by way of a fortuitous encounter quite unrelated to the matter: for example six months I try to draw a camel in a way that satisfies me, and I make a thousand attempts without ever managing to do it. Then one day it is a drawing of a plump on the label of a pot of jam or the shadow thrown by an ink pot, or something or other equally unrelated to the matter that provides me with the solution. This kind of thing has happened so often that I have acquired the habit of always being on the outlook, and when I want to draw a camel I no longer limit myself, as I once did, to looking (only, fh) at camels…

                                                          

                                                                                             Il flute sur la boss (1947)

On Art Brut: Those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere – are, because of these very facts, more precious than the productions of professionals. After a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade.

                             

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