Bombast

Scale and Proportion

“Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing” Bertrand Russell In math no one disputes the golden ratio’s most perfect proportions. Nothing else looks right. Mathematical proportions are found throughout nature. And proportion is a term more often used in art, but both can be used interchangeably. What we see is understood by intuitive intelligence. Beauty is the goal of both math and science as well as art. Beauty always depends on right proportions. When something is out-of-scale with its surroundings you don’t have to be an artist to know it’s unsightly, looks wrong, out of place. The projected ballroom overshadows the White House projecting a sense that it’s even more important than the historic building that has been the seat of power for our country. More like a throne room, it is a monstrosity that will never be beautiful but will be acutely visible. And that is the point. Visibility, the human need beneath all the others to be seen. Bigger and flashier gets noticed and maybe for some it’s enough. Likewise, the scale of a data center or an ICE detention center does not harmonize with the look or needs of the surrounding community. That it will use more than its share or energy and water is obvious. The existence of such places at all makes our visual response recoil. The people who say it doesn’t bother them are the ones who don’t look. Harmony s not the goal for those in charge. They want the look of domination. This is not just philosophical. Neurologists have shown that buildings affect our mood and sense of well-being. Out of scale architecture is felt as oppressive. We have specialized neurons for proportions is the hippocampal area. What is out-of-scale for human size makes people feel powerless and depersonalized intentionally, creating an illusion of permanence against the temporary passerby. The ballroom and other massive architectural plans are not just an aesthetic problem but also psychological. Understanding that it is an attack, we should fight the process of building these monstrosities. What we see affects us all the time. Because location is so woven into personal psychology these structures are an assault on our sense of connection to the world designed to emphasize how little we matter against the power of the monarch. Beauty is our guidance toward right relationships. As google’s AI says, “Beauty and rightness are deeply connected concepts… as expressions of moral and spiritual perfection.” It’s a conclusion drawn from all that is written about it on the internet. Looking at art can re-establish our connection to the whole. Artists communicate what it feels like to live in this world more deeply than what we hear and read. The arts can reinforce our sense of beauty as guidance to truth and resist imagery that’s meant to harm us.

Absence

Image Significance

When I did a google search on the two words of the title, the AI summary was gratifying. It said, “Images carry deep significance because they communicate complex ideas, emotions and history instantly without words. They shape human culture, record crucial moments and trigger powerful personal feelings.” Adding later that it makes people connected across distances, AI seemed to be summarizing what I try to communicate in my blog. Awakening feelings is central to my own goals because it’s the beginning of thoughts and memories in the viewer. Paraphrasing something Thomas Carlyle said about books, the chief value of a work of art is that it excites viewers to self-activity. This is my own goal for the work, to have the feelings in the work stimulate another’s ideas and emotions. Becoming more aware of emotions is essential for modern people since we can have no empathy for others if our feelings are hidden and repressed. As Pat Barker wrote about the men fighting in WWI in her powerful antiwar novel, Regeneration, “They’d been trained to identify emotional repression as the essence of manliness.” This is an attitude that’s been slow to fade in many cultures and it’s not hard to see it’s role in cruelty and insensitivity to the plight of others in so much of what we see today. Art has the power to increase self-awareness, and this is not a small personal matter. It’s crucial to the survival of the planet. So much of human culpability is shut out, disregarded, made invisible behind the smokescreen of the ego’s preferences in how to think about ourselves. Those in power today refuse to acknowledge the devouring rapacity of the harm their willful blindness is causing, so hurt and damaged inside they need to cause visible damage in a matching scale. Not only do they not recognize the shameful behavior, they seek to erase the records, to make their shame invisible to others, an act that reveals the hidden judgment. Every artist brings out what they find significant. The viewer then sees what’s shown in the light of the artists feelings, forging a connection and stirring the viewer’s mind with their own connections to that feeling. To follow what happens in the mind when looking at art whether it’s reveling in the amazing colors and textures or resonating with the expression in a portrait, physiologically it enlivens the brain and psychologically it builds awareness of how feeling connects with memory and thought. It broadens our perceptual sensitivity. More art is crucial for bringing so many qualities of human culture, good and bad, to awareness. Amidst so much trivial stimulation art clarifies significance, showing what matters.

Withdrawn

EarthPsyche

“The context for defining sanity in our time has reached planetary magnitude” Written in1995 by Theodore Roszak in his introduction to “Ecopsychology”, the essays in the book by diverse authors emphasize the need to take the planet into account in our psychology. I discovered the book in 1998 on a bookstore remainder table. Almost thirty years later we haven’t begun to integrate our dependence on our environment into our approach to our psyche What has it done to our personal psychology to repress our connection to our home planet for so long, collaborating with a system that leaves a stand of trees in front of a clearcut forest. In one of the essays psychologist Sarah Conn suggests that our “materialistic disorder” grows from our loss of relationship to a larger context creating an emptiness that needs filling. Our environment flows through us all the time in the food and air and water but also the many processes that unfold in and around us. The imbalance in our world is visible. Air quality today is 243. Unhealthy begins at 150. A dirty orange thickness of smoke flows across the street dusting the green with pollutants. We can see the distress in the air. In our lungs and in our mood, we feel the planets distress. We have to breathe. Studies since the 70s have shown that crime goes up, depression and anxiety all go up with the rise in air pollution. We have allowed our individual selves to think we’re separate too long. Maybe we should consider ourselves as a where. William James referred to ‘I‘ as a pronoun of location. Our dependence on our earth habitat underscores how much a part of our being it is. Without gravity we’d float off into space. Instead, we’re held by the earth, systems within systems. This kind of complexity needs to be shown not explained. Visual philosophy refers to the use of imagery to show the important relationships. Balance and imbalance, harmony and proportion can be seen and tie us to a larger context. We’re never free of the world around us. We breathe it, feed ourselves, move around on it. Gregory Bateson once said that the unit of survival was not the individual but individual in environment because without the environment, we won’t survive. Lewis Thomas thought of “fittest” as referring to what fit best into the environment. Our psychology should include our relationship to the earth, starting with where we are. Fire, floods and monster storms won’t let us ignore the planet any longer. We need to extend our psychology to include our relationship to the earth. What is it now and how might it evolve in harmony with the ecosystem? Seeing the many ways our ebb and flow is part of the larger ebb and flow enables us to harmonize rather than disrespect the cycles, patterns a resources of our home planet.

Judgment