Open Letter To Artists (From An Art Critic) - Part 23
by Joan Altabe - 01/18/2006

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Aesthetics is not a foreign word

Because FAR^® is a website teeming with art makers and art lovers, it's reasonable to ask what this thing is that we make and love. I get asked this question a lot.

My answer starts with what art isn't. It isn't an elitist activity for a precious few, privy to its secrets. Art has to do with aesthetics and expression, both of which live in everyone. Expression is the easy part. But say "aesthetics" and people's eyes tend to glaze over into a toneless stare, unaware that the nature of aesthetic form is the nature of the human form. Aesthetics is natural to us. We're even drawn to it.

For starters, aesthetics is balance, immediately recognizable because our bodies are living lessons in symmetry. Noses and mouths are centered on our faces. Arms and legs are even in length. People make aesthetic statements just being. And to be comfortable in the world around us, we have a need to see the balance that lives in us. Imbalance upends us. In art, balance comes in patterns of light, color and line. Picasso's double-vision "Girl Before the Mirror" is the picture of balance.

But balance without rhythm is lifeless. Pictures, like people, need heartbeats. Repetition of a light, line or color is a picture's pulse, carrying our eyes around it like plasma carrying oxygen around the body.

In Goya's "The Third of May," a line of French soldiers in a firing squad is repeated, suggesting the rhythmic sound of sequential rifle fire.

Of course, too much rhythm and balance can be monotonous. Enter contrast, also found in the human form. Hardness of fingernails distinct from softness of skin is an example. Contrast creates interest. The uniformed, over-coated firing squad is the ultimate foil for the shirt-sleeved patriots in "The Third of May."

The other component in art is expression - of thought, of feeling. Artists use color and composition like writers use words. The color blue in the sad-aired "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" is Van Gogh's action verb. The same goes for composition; in this case, a strategic slanting of the figure, as though it were sinking.

But without aesthetics, a display of emotions in image-making would be merely a tantrum made graphic. Art exalts human feeling and makes it stately, using rhythm, balance and contrast.

Both aesthetics and expression mark "The Sleeping Gypsy" by Henri Rousseau - artfully portraying a lion creeping up on an unconscious woman alone - is fear and loneliness made sublime. The woman and animal, dark in the shadow of the moon, balance an expanse of uninterrupted moonlit sky. Stripes on the woman's robe, undulating to her breathing, provide the rhythm and heartbeat of the scene. Everybody experiences fear. Ennobling fear, as Rousseau has done, honors humankind, testifies to the condition of it and makes it grand.

What is art, then? Art is us.

Some of the elements of painting – line, shape and pattern – also make the case.

Line traces us, our contour. We knew this back when we lived in caves and painted the edges of the woolly rhinoceros on rock walls.

Shape, which is line enclosed, is the stuff of our form, too. The ancient Greeks emphasized this when they painted human figures on their vases and matched the curves of the object to ours.

And pattern is an element that Oriental painters often used to create a pleasing arrangement of shape, not unlike the one that is us. James McNeill Whistler, a fan of Japanese prints, was big on pattern in the painting of his mother, "Arrangement in Black and White."

Given that art is us, is it any wonder that art is a mystery?

— Joan Altabe | January 18, 2007

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