Capturing the Moment

"Luncheon of the Boating Party" by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

As part of my continued artistic journey, I have been reading books and doing tutorials. I purchased the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards, a book that made a huge impact on my initial studies in my late teens and early twenties. It's all about if you can see it, you can draw it. 

Along this path, I stumbled upon a book by Kristy Gordon entitled "Become a Great Artist". The book has a 13-week program to help take your art to the next level. It had a good review so I bought it.

When I read Kristy's story in the first chapter of the book, there were definitely some parallels to my own. Though I followed a musical creative path for most of my adult life, when I last pursued visual art, I did (and still do) have some of the same struggles around my artistic voice as she did. She would describe being prone to painting like whomever she was influenced by at the time and never really finding her own true artistic voice. This was among the reasons I gave up on my visual art all those years ago. 

The last time I was pursuing my visual art full-time, I was young and impressionable. I was also very insecure. Life had a lot in store for me, that would force me me to grow and evolve into a mentally healthy person. But this hadn't happened yet. I was passionate though. I knew I was talented, but as I have described in previous blog posts, I didn't feel "cool" or "contemporary". I was good at painting "grandma's pretty flowers" not at creating fashionable art that would get my peers' attention. 

I would see other pieces of art and think "I could do that!" Then I would throw myself into creating art that looked like that, but somehow it still didn't look right. Because it wasn't me, it was them. It was painting like whomever I was mimicking at the time. Needless to say, this disingenuousness shone through the art and it was not well received. Looking back at it now, it's obvious it was because I wasn't being myself, I was trying to be someone else. 

In music, this never works. When country music wasn't cool in Copenhagen, I tried my hand at every other style of music under the sun, but it all seemed to come out with a twang. This was not met with enthusiasm by my peers. It wasn't until I fully embraced that my music is country music and moved halfway across the world to pursue it that I started feeling at home in my music. I made a career out of being genuinely me in everything I did with music. Whenever I would veer off this path, I would immediately see it and feel it in my work and the reception of it.

I believe this is fundamentally true for any kind of art. So as I am once again exploring visual arts, I am painfully aware of where I left off. I am 25 years older, wiser, and certainly more secure, but I haven't found my voice yet. So reading Kristy Gordon's book seemed like a good place to start. 

The first exercise in the book was to find ten pieces of art from ten different artists that inspire you and speak to you. Art that you love. Some, for me, were no-brainers. "Guernica" by Pablo Picasso, made a tremendous impact on me when I saw it in person at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Mark Rohtko's squares and rectangles left me breathless at the MACBA in Barcelona. Gaudí's art nouveau architecture always inspired me. I would track down any Roy Lichtenstein exhibit I could find. Others were not as simple. 

Once you have gathered your art pieces, she has you answer some questions about them. In short, they reflect you as an artist. It was very helpful to me to evaluate the art I find inspiring, rather than my own art, as a way to figure out my voice as an artist. My art is not what I want it to be yet. So evaluating that alone would never show my voice. My voice is exactly what my art is lacking right now. But looking at what inspires me (with a few exceptions) I found the following themes:

• Bold colors, especially blues, purples, oranges, and greens.
• The intentional use of negative space and the golden mean.
• Smooth transitions, and not many hard lines.
• Most importantly: They all seem to capture a "moment."

Once I realized that they all seemed to capture a "moment" I had a realization: Most of the art in this collection was from a time when "capturing the moment" was the entire purpose of a painting. But could that still be true today? In a world where everyone is capturing the moment every day and posting it to TikTok, could the purpose of a painting still be to capture the moment? 

Although photographs and video certainly capture what is, I started thinking if they truly capture a "moment". True, they depict exactly what happened in that moment, in great detail. But isn't there more to a moment than that? How many times have you tried taking a photo of a sunset and it paled in comparison to your experience of it? So what if the role of a painting is still to capture a moment, not just the likeness of it, but the essence of it? After all, our experience of a moment is entirely subjective.

Science has found that the human memory is incredibly unreliable. The brain will fill in the blanks, so to speak, and literally make things up, adding and subtracting details that weren't even there. I'm sure we have all experienced a bright, sunny day and remember it as sad and dreadful, because of something that was going on in our lives at that moment. I know I have been soaking wet, cold, and in the rain, but because I had the most amazing day, doing what I love, I found it to be the most beautiful thing in the world. Video and photos don't capture these moments because they don't capture the experience of the moment. 

This is what I like to see in art. This is what I want my art to be. How I get there is yet to be revealed, but at least I know where I'm going now.