Art, Interpretation and Perception
Two unrelated microscopic events happened in my life recently that somehow landed in a relation. The relation that sparked in my neural scheme suddenly gave birth to words, forms, pictures of fireworks that happens behind my eyes in response to world in front of them. So, this is a raw translation of the perception created by those fireworks into words.
Event One
A friend of mine asked me to look at this painting and interpret with an emotion of choice. Just one rule, “Don’t google this”. I have no knowledge of art or artists and never been to any art galleries. So when I looked at this painting, all I was seeing was a feeling of reminiscence.
In the past, I had taken shots at writing blogs but never did I try sculpting my words as a figure of poem or verse. This was my shot at it exploring. So judge me nice ;)
denial / anticipation
how odd it is
that i see the same place the same way
while the same place isn’t the same place
it doesn’t wear the fabric it used to
it doesn’t carry the scent it used to
it doesn’t sing the song it used to
i’m here yet again
dropped by the same train
feeling nothing but insane
to come back againhow odd it is
that the same place is the same place
even when years became eons
it does wear the color it used to
it does carry the aroma it used to
it does sing the lyrics it used to
i’m here yet again
dropped by the same train
standing with my backpain
to feel humanehow odd it is
that i deny and anticipate
for the same place
at the same time
P.S. thoughts come with no punctuation in our heads so added none to keep it the same way
Event Two
Another friend of mine threw this at me randomly, “I want to understand the thought process that gets you to an understanding of a particular art. I know understanding art is subjective, but I want to change my shallow perspective by getting an idea or a slight essence of deeper perspective, observation and understanding”. If anything, he has keen eyes on the world. What I did, I repeated Event One with him.
I was expecting something superficial from him but something different showed up. Apart from the fact that how keenly he was trying to sense the meaning behind the brush strokes taking different flows, shapes and directions — despite doing an exercise like this for the first time — his lines, as I read them, painted a picture of deep sadness as the only emotion he could associate the art with.
He said the extensive use of dark blue in the painting made him perceive likewise. Colors are often perceived as narrow beings. But colors of the same band can exhibit wide and contrasting characters.
Take a look at this interpretation of the same art by another human.
The Relation
This is more like Schrödinger’s cat situation. Dead and Alive. Related and Unrelated. Why am I writing this? ’Cause this time I chose to open the box and see the relation for once than just be oblivious to the boxes infront of me always.
Word of caution, sometimes it is better to let the box be. So know when ;)
He and I are still toddlers in making sense of this world. So I believe this piece could be a layman version of introduction to perspectives for other such toddlers.
How a fun exercise from Event One and an introspecting question from Event Two have helped me visualize how I see and perceive the world around me through the windows of a microscopic world I molecularized that flows on a cosmic spread is the relation.
Perception widens through exploration.
A continuous exploration for experiences is the pathway for our consciousness to learn to see the multiverse of perspectives of the worldly events, actions and stories. More simply, the very experience of the world.
Often times, we perceive things from our very own core state of ongoing or pent up experience from the past or the present. This is the viewer perspective. Like the cliche — we see things as we are.
Second, there is the creator perspective. The context of the creator/ artist’s side leading to the transformation of thoughts to shapes, forms, figures, words and functions. This is more like the original essence of the creation.
We are too impatient to look for the author/ artist/ creator’s perspective. So we assume things based on a self constructed and constrained synthetic box of perception misleading us to pseudo-perception of truth and reality. The result of this is misunderstanding, argument, conflict, abuse, hatred and war. Good thing in art is there is no such thing as right perspective. Its all about opening up to what it is really infront of us. It is irrelevant to label one’s perception as amateur infact when we all have unique lens to view the world.
These are the only two ways to interpret an art or the world itself.
But there is a third one.
Which I believe is the pathway to truth. And creative problem solving.
Now that we know what we think about something and what the creator think about that something — this is where the exploration steps in and stumble us upon a multitude of viewpoints that is more than what we perceive as intended of the object infront of us. I call it the spectral perspective.
The world we experience is just an approximation created by the senses and brain. One thing we know from science is that everything is energy, and energy is a spectrum.
in self simulated worlds
Our brain always picks up the shortest, fastest and easiest way to keep ourselves sane to live through life. So we reflect or pick one frequency from the wide spectrum of possibilities to construct a self manifested world of ours. It is true that we all live in our own unique worlds.
This constructs the core of our consciousness making us believe we are only this one personality type when, truly, we are a spectrum. We set ourselves a narrative and we stick to it. Spending and speeding the rest of our lives without atleast taking a peek outside the walls we built.
I hinted about this in one of my medium blogs as perspective intelligence. You can find it here.
Coming back to art interpretation, there are two key ways to craft this type of perspective. One is to find them, and second is able to switch between them and come closer the perception of truth. This is colloquially known as context switching. This is really an energy intensive thought process. History tells us stories of people with such a powerful ability that they developed to craft the life around us in the past and the present.
Some artists/ creators are skilled enough to create creations that is widely and wildly subjective like I illustrated below. This is true to the statement calling art is subjective. This is more than looking at it from the state we are.
It can be true that what you see in an art or a painting is a close reflection of how your core self is currently experiencing the world.
This is what I love about art.
“You see yourself
with all your self.
You see how clothed you are,
how heavy it felt so far.
You unclothe to see your raw naked self,
in that spectral world behind that shelf
of your eyes.”
What separates us from other species on Earth?
Thinking.
We have become this extraordinary species ever existed just only in the last couple of thousands of years over the lifespan of billions of years of Earth to think far and beyond in the quest to explore limits.
I used to think curiosity was the driver behind this exploration. I was wrong.
It could not be just that.
It is empathy.
That opens us up, and sheds our filters & biases in perception, to the awareness of the beauty in journeying closer towards the truth.
yours, me.
