On learning to see and love through art
it made me love humanity and myself at a depth I never did.
Gifted with an utilitarian education and culture, I grew up with a non-appreciation of art — bordering on being disparaging. When I started to practice design, I would often get mildly annoyed when people would assume I loved art, or that design is art.
“Art is self-expression, design is about solving problems,” I would repeatedly tell people in exasperation. To the utilitarian in me, I questioned the place of art in society and the world at large — why are we hanging pretty pictures on the wall when there are so many problems to solve?
Then the internet changed everything, as it has been, throughout my life.
Through the wonderfully serendipitous nature of the internet, I stumbled across this:
I have been drawn to Van Gogh not by the virtue of his art — how preposterous — but his story. How he suffered, how people thought he was insane, how he allegedly shot himself in the end, without knowing he would come to be one of the greatest artists to ever have graced this world.
It was with this context that I read:
in a period of intense suffering, Van Gogh was somehow able to perceive and represent one of the most supremely difficult concepts nature has ever brought before mankind, and to unite his unique mind’s eye with the deepest mysteries of movement, fluid and light.
For the first time, I belatedly realized, they were not just pretty pictures hanging on walls. What secrets are there, hidden in these?
I visited an art museum for the first time in September 2014, age 33, at the Met. Imagine having one’s first museum experience in mid-life at the Met. I had an untrained eye, with not much prior knowledge of art history. I saw it as a blessing, able to experience the pieces in a primitive, intuitive way, as opposed to having a critical filter imposed on me without my conscious will.
There was a particular piece that would remain in my consciousness for a long time:
(I apologize in advance for all the terrible crops and framing, because I always feel conspicuous taking pictures at museums.)
I was just so taken by the amount of detail that exists in this painting. I stared at it for a long while. How, what, how, I kept repeating to myself.
I would recognize the same artist at the Louvre almost a year later, still remaining entranced:
At the d’Orsay, I came across:
I stared at him for a long time. I started feeling tears form at the corner of my eyes, uncontrollably.
I saw a reflection of my own lifelong sadness, in those eyes.
Paris was 39°C that day, so I stayed at the d’Orsay, reading The Letters of Vincent van Gogh on my kindle. It would trigger my first series of thoughts about leaving San Francisco, the city I called my home.
In Barcelona, I experienced the Sagrada Família. My pictures will not do it justice, it has to be experienced, to be lived. How could one capture the essence and insistence of someone’s work spanning across a century? Groundbroken in 1882, and it is scheduled to complete in 2028.
146 years. In my country, we tear down architecture and build new ones at breakneck speed — 2 years, or less. I do not comprehend the magnitude of the work, and probably never will.
It made me rethink my belief systems and values about work. Fast, fast, fast, all we care about. It made me question if a man like Gaudí would exist today, if we would give them the room for such breathtaking work — how much are we losing through the worship of speed:
Journeying to Ljubljana, I came across a pair of dragons on a bridge. I started crying again. I possess very little historical context, so it gives me a blank slate to be taken by experiences I come across. I started to see these pieces of work all over the city and I got reminded of this quote:
“I think part of the power of any artwork is the physical presence you sense behind the creation.” — Bill Watterson
At MoMA I came across Gilbert and George and yes, I started crying again (apparently it is a thing to cry at museums):
The pair regard themselves as “living sculptures”. They refuse to disassociate their art from their everyday lives, insisting that everything they do is art.
I thought it was fitting to say my final farewell to the United States by finally seeing Starry Night:
It was very symbolic for me, paying homage to a painting that started me on a journey to see a world I never knew I had within, for:
Art has made me love humanity at a depth I never did.
Through an unspoken language, I have felt the power of expression — the incessant urge to express that transcendent connection that binds the inner and outer world. The greatest pieces for me, are the ones who are able to make us feel the symbiotic relationship of the universe’s expansiveness to the depth of our souls.
How much must one live and love, to be capable of creating something that will make people stop in their tracks and cry? How much does one have to transcend, to wilfully ignore yet vulnerably absorb?
There is wonderment at my fellow human beings’ level of craft and imagination, pride of knowing they have once graced our worlds. I think about Biblical art, the sheer amount of effort and finesse to bring something with no physical representation into life in excruciating detail, as though those scenes have happened right before their eyes. Art provokes endless fascination in me.
That power has moved so many of us to devote our entire lives and hearts, in hope of expressing a tiny slice of our world at that particular time and space, imprinted with the juxtaposition of our individual soul. The artist is choosing to let us see their souls with imperceptible intimacy, even for a split second, but that generosity is only possible with the temporary strict closure of one’s world.
I started questioning the way I have lived my life and perceived my work. I have seen the world and my existence as a series of problems to solve, without realizing that one of the greatest gifts of humanity is the innate capacity for irresistible creative self-expression. We express, because we can, we want to, and we have to.
There is inherent beauty in the world, even at her darkest corners, to be seen, felt and expressed. Not everything is a problem to solve — to not acknowledge that, is to take something away from our humanity.
We have been creating since the beginning of our time. Even when we were faced with terror, we were still creating. It is our inheritance, our solace, our unspoken stories.
I now know, some of the greatest gifts of life can only be felt, irrevocably touching us, without leaving a trail of measurement or evidence, that they once shaped the very fabric of our souls.
Art speaks for us, when we can’t.
It reminds us that there are some parts of us, that will never be adequately expressed with mere language, and those are the parts, that make us uniquely human.
Art made me love myself in a way I never did.
It made me discover the spirit that has always been latent in me, the spirit that seeks to create and not to be measured. It made me realize I cannot keep seeing myself as a series of problems to solve. It made me see myself as an entity to be moulded, crafted, continually worked upon — not fixed.
I think about Van Gogh’s sad eyes. I think about all the art I have come across, and I wonder about the loss we would suffer if they had done their work based on venture capital, metrics and reviews. I wonder about how many souls the art has gently or violently touched, how much they have reminded us of our humanity, how deeply they have provoked us to think and feel.
I wonder how much will I stand to lose, if I continued to dishonor the dimensions of my self which were trying to surface, if I continued blocking the expression of what had been trying to be expressed.
By experiencing art, I know I am not alone. That we were simply trying to be alive, by extending parts of our unknown selves, into a known form that can be part of this world.
That is how we discover the utter beauty that exists within. A beauty that is not an answer to a problem, that doesn’t require a reason to exist. A beauty that is beautiful, because it just is.
Art to me, is about exercising that choice to believe that existence can exist by virtue of its own existence, that the inner potential of humanity is as infinite as the universes.
It cannot be formulated. We have to solely rely upon the graciousness, patience and the will of the artist, the fragile hope that a clear enough connection can be protectively made between the internal and the external, that at least a fragment of what is felt can be seen.
Art can only exist, if we consciously choose. The will to make that choice, is what being human is about. It is not about being shepherded as a statistic, it is about expressing a part of ourselves only the individual can express, standing on the massive shoulders of the collective.
Art has changed me, gifting me a fresh set of lenses to look at the world. I stopped seeing us as a series of problems to solve. We are not machines.
We are filled with so much randomness, so much unknown, yet we insist on making each other think and act the same way.
We can be an astonishing array of beauty, if we let ourselves be, if we believe we can be.
But we don’t. We see ourselves as an array of problems.
I can only hope against all odds, art will continue to speak for us, to push us in directions logic and rationalism will never propel us to to make us remember and understand the incredible heritage we all possess; that perhaps, we’re just undergoing a chaotic process of becoming; that it will awaken us to the infinite immeasurable universes that exists within —
just like it did for me.
Postscript: I am still very early in my journey, so while I referenced mostly western visual art, I am keenly aware of the breadth I am still missing. However, I anticipate at what lies ahead.
