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What It Is
Is it what it is? Or is it
what you think it is?
Being a painter, I have
had to deal with this
question in various
oblique ways over the
years. It isn't a
simple matter of things
being what they are, and
if you think they are
something else, then you
are mistaken. Subjectively
and objectively play games
with each other. For most
of human history we have
concerned ourselves with
identifying things in such
a way that they are
more-or-less the same for
everyone. When abstract
painting appeared, at
first people would ask
questions like "What
is it supposed to
be?" It was
disturbing for many, who
wondered what they were
missing. For centuries,
though, people had been
accustomed to finding
metaphor in poetry, which
is like abstract painting
in the sense that it
describes something by
describing something else.
As with Impressionism,
people began to "see
things" and question
what they were seeing.
Whether or not humans have
actually bettered
themselves in the last
thousand years, what we
think of as human progress
has always depended on our
willingness to look at
things in a new and
different way, to expand
our sense of the possible
by using the playing
ground between our inner
and outer worlds. When a
child comes to us and
holds out a hand full of
grass with a rock in the
middle of it, and says,
"This is a castle in
the forest," we feel
something mysterious
brewing in our minds. If
this looks like a castle
in a forest, what if we
were standing beside a
castle in a forest? Would
it look like a rock in a
handful of grass?
Having
been a painter for perhaps
too many years, I
sometimes look at one of
my older paintings, and
ask myself, "What is
it?" Then I recall
that it has always been
part of the artist's
job to ask such questions.
There is something in our
human nature that makes us
want to question and doubt
things, even as we are
affirming them.
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