500 Words a Week - Thinking About Art
Lately, I’ve been thinking about art and the feelings it can evoke within us. Regardless of whether it is painting, writing, music, films, or TV programmes. The art that we will always remember is the one that made us feel something.
This reflection is spurred on after watching The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 2. If you have watched, you’ll know the moment I’m referring to. If not, I won’t describe any further for fear of spoilers.
Sometimes, art is most effective in its ability to describe the way we are feeling internally. The emotions we may struggle to put into words are shown before us in a way that makes us feel seen, heard, understood, and not alone.
Building upon these feelings, art can also leave us with a message of hope. A message to choose action, to embrace this one life we have before us. Maybe it’s the kind of action that leaves us feeling inspired from within, trusting in our own capabilities despite the circumstances around or within us. Maybe it’s the kind of action that leads us to look again at the beauty of the ordinary moments around us. Or maybe it simply allows us to press pause and escape for a small period of time, to immerse ourselves in another world.
The power of art also allows us to experience the world through a different set of eyes, to feel the utter depths of suffering at the hands of another or of oneself, and the joyful highs that life can hold. Some art allows us to live another life, with all the trials, tribulations, failures, and learnings distilled within us.
Sometimes, I think school didn’t help us cultivate our own relationship with art. We were often told how to interpret what was in front of us, and perhaps not as much encouraged to follow our own curiosities. To learn to pay attention to how what we see, hear, or experience makes us feel. To establish our own relationship with art, to move away from thoughts about how we are supposed to feel, and instead just notice what we actually experience. Notice what moves you, what doesn’t move you, and ask yourself why. Why do you think this piece of art makes you feel this way?
Art sometimes has its way of returning back to us or finding us when we most need it. At one stage of life, a certain book could feel slow, dry, and unrelatable. Yet that same book, at a different stage of life, could speak to us in surprising and meaningful ways.
Art is a personal relationship, one that grows and deepens over the course of our life, should we let it, and begin paying attention to how certain aspects of art make us feel.
Follow your own curiosity. Ignore the stigma. Ignore the critics telling you what you must feel and what you must enjoy.
Be open to what you see before you. And maybe, in that way, art teaches us to be open to the world around us.
