Blue

I thought I would share with you today a piece I created several years ago. There are times when I feel the need to produce something visual rather than through the written word. Art to me has always held in itself a sense of romance simply by the nature of its existence. So drastically can it spur emotion and move us without doing anything but hanging there on a wall.

The first time a painting took my breath away was on the slide show screen of an art history class I took in college. The painting was by Joseph M. William Turner, an Englishman from the late 17/early 1800's. I sat right in the middle of the room as the professor sorted through slide after slide of work form the period, when this mass of color came bursting onto the screen. It was massive, several times it's actual size, it seemed to overtake the entire space I was inhabiting. As was typical of the artist, this scene was of the sea. In this particular one, a ship had wrecked, its inhabitants spread across the waters. It was not the story that struck me so, however. It was the intense color, the movement and energy created by the masses of yellows and blues, blacks and reds. The piece seemed to move before me, take me in. I nearly gasped at the sight of it. Nearly lost a few tears as well.

Call me crazy if you like. I certainly don't claim to be an artist, but I do have a definite appreciation for it. I realize that art doesn't affect everyone in the same way, but in that alone there is a beauty to it. For one thing to mean so many things to so many different people is, well, simply put, amazing. For one visual boxed in piece of canvas and paint and brush strokes to produce such a vast array of responses, it becomes more than the sum of its parts. It becomes art. For me that is romance, that is excitement and wonder and subject for conversation. We put ourselves into what we create and it allows us to connect with each other, to express ourselves and to show what we are made of. I cannot recall my mindset when I created this piece. It was probably more about expressing gradual changes and the intensity of color more than anything. I called it 'electric blue eyes' at that time. Perhaps I was trying to capture the essence and beauty of the eye, the seductive liquid blue eye of someone you can't take your sight from. It is hard to say. In any case, it was a romance for me, between myself and the paintbrush, the pigment and the paper. It is a romance that reappears now and then, asks for a late night date or an afternoon that flies by so quickly that it seems it was hardly even there.