Art is according to the Oxford Dictionary is defined as “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” Ergo, it means that art is the transference of feelings; a muted conversation between an artist and a viewer.
Some of the earliest paintings known as cave art depicted animals, clearly displaying the basic human desire for self expression; the most obvious one at that point in history being their coexistence with other animals in the wild. The urge to shout out, “I’ve seen this,” or “I’ve felt this,” or “I can warn you about this,” metamorphosed into art. The perpetual question remains: is art someone else’s version of reality? And moreover, have artists dramatised and distorted a perfectly ordinary reality into something deep, dark and intriguing because of their own disturbed minds? Have they consciously invoked their dark side in order to purge it upon the masses and create sensational works?
Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, Vincent Van Gogh and many other artists suffered from clinical depression. They wove their feelings discreetly or sometimes indiscreetly into images or words and left them open to public viewing. And yet, inspite of this very personal nature of art, people have always accepted an artist’s interpretation as a reflection of their own. They have gushed over artworks and heralded them: be it The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci or Edvard Munch’s rather abstract The Scream.
People find themselves able to see between the colours and sense the serenity, or divinity or even confusion of the artist and the muse alike, as it echoes their own untapped emotions. Andy Warhol collected the airplane menus, Hemingway courted war and adventure, Beethoven fought with his increasing deafness. All three artists grew larger than life with the passage of time, reaching a reverential status in modern times until the lines between their personal lives and their professional personas grew dim, so dim that one can seldom speak about a piece of their art without using their charismatic characters as a reference point. There lies the essence of art; the metaphorical blurring of colours, the mingling of fact and fiction, reality and imagination, right and wrong, good and evil, artist and non-artist and until neither can be differentiated.
The Blind Men and the Elephant is a famous Indian fable that tells the story of six blind travellers that came across different parts of an elephant in their life journeys. In turn, each blind man created his own version of reality from that limited experience and perspective. Perhaps, artists do create out of their personal experiences; either imagined or conjured, whethere overly dramatic in nature, the artwork itself is that rare commodity which crosses over from the subjective to the objective, merely by the sharing of it.
