Ten Years of Seeing Meaning

"Material Dimension"  Most viewed image on blog

I launched this blog in April of 2008 and it’s been a pleasure to share thoughts and images that express my sense of what a picture can show about what matters.  On the occasion of this tenth anniversary I want to thank everyone who has stopped here to read or look, and think about how meaning is expressed visually. By showing what’s significant, art expands perception Developing the wisdom of the overview will be more useful to a rapidly changing future, than preset ideas. To trust what we see puts universal values at the core and takes every situation for the unique experience it is rather than filtered by labels and categories.

Having readers from ninety countries shows that these are ideas that resonate all over the world. There is a global shift of consciousness that is spreading as the necessary foundation for effective future thought.

To celebrate my ten years sharing these ideas, here are the links to my five most popular essays in order.

http://seeingmeaning.blogspot.com/2008/08/visual-philosophy.html

http://seeingmeaning.blogspot.com/2010/06/organic-intelligence.html

http://seeingmeaning.blogspot.com/2009/02/sense-of-beauty.html

http://seeingmeaning.blogspot.com/2008/10/idealized-self-image.html

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http://seeingmeaning.blogspot.com/2010/05/contradictory-truth.html

Here are the top five images.

"Heaviness"

     

"Restraint"

"Cool Under Fire"

"CoCausal"

What a pleasure it’s been to emphasize a shift to perceptual thinking that feels necessary and that uses an untapped capacity it’s time to put to use. Hopefully more will share their ideas on the same concepts, and if they do, in the future I will take advantage of the opportunity for dialogue and comment back.

More Primitive Emotions

Snarling Puppy  oil on panel   2018         photo by Kyle Kutner

This is currently showing at the Peale Center until May 6.

The Need to See

Nina Simone “How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?”

An image is a starting point for thinking. What it triggers is evoked from the life experience of the viewer, but the trigger itself is a structure of interrelationships that offers a way of putting past observations in a new light. Art presents a new perspective and the life of the work once created is continued in the minds of the viewers. The most significant new ideas always involve seeing in a new way whether in an individual’s personal evolution or a paradigm shift in a field of study. The philosopher Thomas Carlyle said, “The chief value of any book is that it excites the reader to self-activity”. This is good brain chemistry. So many of the connections to the nucleus accumbens, considered the pleasure center, come from the area associated with creative thinking and other higher mental activity, the prefrontal cortex. One function of art is to get people’s minds working, not just to stimulate new ways of thinking but to direct attention to what is important, to emphasize values. People need to know what matters.

Ai WeiWei is an artist that sees the need to make something visible, showing what numbers on a page can’t do, move us with the visceral reaction to quantity thereby making us feel the impact of the numbers. He draws attention to lost schoolchildren or refugees, big groups that are ignored to avoid feeling the connection to the tragedy. In the great line from Arthur Miller’s, “Death of a Salesman”- “Attention must be paid.”, talking about the everyday struggles of living. Art shines light on what people need to see. As long as we don’t see, we can avoid responsibility. When we see, we can’t avoid responding. That’s why art can have powerful influence on changing consciousness, and that’s where serious change will have to happen. Once a situation is taken in differently, it can change a whole point of view.

While the internet opens new territory to see, because it is led by the personal search, what a person is looking for can blinker them to what could actually enlarge the point of view. A simple way to open it up is to do image searches on topics of interest, narrow the search to contemporary art with your subject and see what current artists are trying to show about the world we all inhabit together. Seeing is the first beam of connection. The strength of the response is a measure of personal significance and an expansion of self-awareness.