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.