YOU TUBE VIDEO dealing with a visit to a museum and an encounter with an artists work
Posted on 8/27/2013 4:20:32 PM
By William Nichols
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Winslow Homer "The Mink Pond"
I could discuss meaning in the visual arts using quite a few artists as examples, but I happened to be looking at Winslow Homer for the moment and was struck by the breadth of experiential richness his small watercolors contain. I bring this up because often people look to see relevance, purpose, and meaning in the arts through the contextual issues of the moment. It is certainly one way of ascribing importance but it can be a very transitory and misleading way of ascribing long term value.
As an example, some years ago I was taking a class I was teaching through a very fine museum when we came upon a painting by a Russian artist that had been purchased by this museum for their collection. It wasn't awful but then again it wasn't very good either. The central image and the theme of the painting had to do with Joseph Stalin and all the baggage associated with this tyrant from the past. I was surprised when many of the students had no idea of who this guy was and what he had done. Without this recognizability, the class picked the painting apart like a cold turkey defining its limitations and poor quality. The museum on the other hand, blinded by the political circumstances of the moment when they had purchased this work, assigned it credit beyond what it deserved. Content and importance in other words, can be transitory and fleeting.
When you look at the visual arts as a provider of meaning that causes us to experience and gain understanding through the power of its prose, i.e., the visual langauge, we often can discover insights that can seem to last from one generation to another and be available as well to varying cultures.
Within the the perimeter of the Homer watercolor, we are invited into a section of a small pond where beauty and danger, naivety and cunning, life and death are captured in the extraordinary complexity of Homer's brushwork, color and drawing. Two competitors vie for a meal of the unsuspecting butterfly. The story like many of those told by the artist is given its reality through the tension that he creates within the visual construction. Dark plays against light, detail crosses swords with ambiguity and the jagged edges add to the tension when seen against the rounded forms of the lilies. It is a scene that reminds us of the big issues in life that can confront us all. A small painting becomes a window through which we can view a big story and a universal theme that we take in quickly and seamlessly whether we are conciously aware of it or not. Good stuff by this artist.
