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What is art? If art is about realism, why even create the images? We have the camera to capture a view of reality to remind ourselves of our experiences. If the purpose of art is to represent awareness then it seems redundant to create endless replicas of the obvious. Perhaps it is worthwhile to do the opposite – to in some way deliberately distort what we see to emphasize or transcend realism. When I am being creative I want to explore something that has previously been outside of my awareness …or perhaps to capture something that is not fully formed and try to develop it.
I love being captivated by a piece of art – to me it’s a feeling of being shifted into a alternate reality – because the ‘reality’ that we each perceive is not necessarily what exists. Even the colors that we see in a piece of art don’t really exist as we see them, they are just different wavelengths of light interpreted by our incredible occipital lobe to give us a color coded representation of the world. This part of the brain seems like a very efficient plugin that saves us the effort of having to calculate the lengths of light waves in order to determine the color of objects.
The ancient Egyptian artists (the first ‘Picasso’s’ of the world) depicted their world as two-dimensional, sometimes showing the front and side view at the same time. They gave emphasis to the parts of the image individually and not necessarily in relation to other parts. They depicted what they ‘knew’ was in front of them with no need to describe the spaces between objects. I would imagine that an artist from that time would be a little puzzled by how we represent the world – with vanishing points and partial views.
So, if deliberate distortion provides another level of awareness, I’m curious about whether there is a universal rule of hyperbole that works aesthetically. There is a wide variety of artistic expression and it can be very stimulating, sometimes too much so. It’s just once in a while that the ratio of distortion is effective.
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