Open Your Eyes...

Our simplest words are often the deepest in meaning: kiss, flight, dream, love, death. Most people spend their entire lives seraching for words like these to define who they truly are internally. Often times people turn to various types of Arts for guidance: visual arts, dance, literature, language, music, poetry, and performing arts are a few examples.

I have recently began my journey through Belmont University as an undeclared major, so I am just starting to get "in the swing of things". I am already two weeks into classes, living in the dorms, meeting new people, and having a wonderful time in Nashville. I knew Nashville was known as a city where many cultures unite, but I never thought I would get an up-close and personal encounter with this issue like I have over the past few weeks. I have grown up around various cultures my whole life, but to be surrounded by numerous cultures in the same place at the same time is a little nerve-racking, quite frankly. I see myself as a fairly open-minded person, yet lately I've been a little annoyed. So... I have lately turned to a new way of "healing" my open-mindedness: Art.

Since I am undecided on my future career path, I have decided to take as many pre-requisite courses (that would truly count) as possible. Of these courses I came up with an art class as just a "wild card". However, this art class isn't just your typical drawing, sculpting, painting class, but a class to teach you how to passionately appreciate art for everything that it is. I have never been one to honestly seek the meaning and feelings that come from art, so going into this I was a tad worried and panicked.

Myself, like most others, find art in the simplest forms: Very likely the walls of your home are decorated with posters, photographs, or even paintings you chose because you find them beautiful or meaningful. Walking around your community or neighborhood you probably pass by buildings that were designed for visual appeal as well as to serve practical ends. If you ever pause for a moment just to look at one of them, to take pleasure, for example, in it's silhouette against the sky, you have made the architect's work live for a moment by appreciating an effect that he or she prepared for you. This aesthetic experience is the branch of philosophy concerned with feelings aroused in us by sensory familiarity- such as sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. This concerns itself with our response to the natural world and to the worlds we make, especially the world of art. The impulse to make and respond to art appears to be deeply ingrained in us like to the ability to learn language, part of what sets us apart as humans. Our aptitude to make images is extremely unique. We do it so naturally and so constantly that we take it for granted. We make them with our hands, and we make them with our minds. Lying out on the grass, for example, you may amuse yourself by finding images in the shifting clouds... now a lion... now an old woman. Are the images really there? We know that a cloud is just a cloud, yet the image is certainly there, because we see it.

One reason for difference in perception is the immense amount of detail available for our attention at any given moment. To navigate efficiently through daily life, we practice selective perception, focusing on the visual information we need for the task at hand and relegating everything else to the background. But other factors are in play as well. Our mood influences what we notice and how we interpret it, as does the whole of our prior experience- the culture we grew up in, relationships we have had, places we have seen, knowledge we have accumulated, seasons that have come and gone, how beauty and sadness were intertwinced, the ceremonies that marked life's passing, the idea of one realm opening onto another, and the fragility of things.

One of my favorite pieces of art is Vincent van Gogh's "The Starry Night". As most of us know, van Gogh was a painfully distorted, tormented, intensely private, introspective, erratic, and impulsive man who had the self-discipline to construct an enormous body of work in a career that lasted only a decade. Not until the age of twenty-seven did he begin to take a serious interest in art, not knowing he had but ten years to live. Ironically enough, most of the work we admire so much was done in the last two and a half years of his life.

In "The Starry Night", Vincent van Gogh labored to express his personal feelings as he stood on the outskirts of a small village in France and looked up at the night sky. Van Gogh had become intrigued by the belief that people journeyed to a star after their death and that there they continued their lives. "Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen," he wrote in a letter, "we take death to reach a star." Seen through the prism of this idea, the night landscape inspired in him a vision of great intensity. Surrounded by halos of radiating light, the stars have an exaggerated, urgent presence, as though each one were a billiant sun. A great wave or whirlpool rolls across the sky- a cloud, perhaps, or some kind of cosmic energy. The landcape, too, seems to roll on in waves like an ocean. A tree in the foreground writhes upward toward the stars as though answering their call. In the distance, a church spire points upward as well. Everything is in turbulent motion. Nature seems alive, communicating in it's own language while the village sleeps.

This type of artwork is what refreshes and awakens our vision to enable us to see the world in new ways. Habit dulls our senses. What we see everyday we no longer marvel at, because it has become familiar. Through art, we can see the world through someone else's eyes and recover the intensity of looking for the first time. By doing this we may find ourselves more attentive to the world around us, which is stranger, more mysterious, more various, and more beautiful than we usually realize. In the end, what we see in the everyday life around us depends on what we bring to it, and if we apprach the task sincerely, there are no wrong answers.