I Believe…
You’re looking at this famous painting of a bald man with his hands by his mouth, and he looks as though he’s howling in horror. Questions start spinning in your head. Who or what’s this person screaming at? Who’s the screamer? Where is he? But there is one thing that is certain: he looks scared, downright horrified.
So maybe Munch, the artist, was struggling with something inside of himself, something that terrified him. The more you look, the more you get an understanding of the painting. It’s almost as though you’re looking into a part of the artist’s mind, a lobe shadowed in mist. Now, the more you look, the more the mist starts to fade, and it’s as if you almost know what the artist was thinking at the time he created his work.
I believe that art is one of the only ways to truly look into someone else’s mind, to see what is going on in his head at that moment.
Some people are not as lucky as others. Some don’t have the talent or ability to put what’s in their head down on paper or canvas. I’m one of the lucky ones, or so I’ve been told. I’m always drawing or doodling something or another, and almost everyone who sees my sketches says how good they look. But then they go right into the question: “Is it supposed to mean this . . . or this?” People always see what they want to at first, but the more they look, the more they begin to realize that maybe the work doesn’t represent what they were thinking. Maybe it means something totally different. This is when they start to think outside of their comfort zone and look at the artwork in a new way. Their brains start reeling with different possibilities of what this might mean. They start thinking of things that maybe they would have never thought before if they hadn’t looked at the artwork in the first place.
I think art is amazing, in any form and in every way. If it weren’t for art, some of the most brilliant minds would’ve gone unnoticed and lost in the sea of time, but thanks to art, these minds get the recognition they deserve. And who knows, I could be famous one day and people might come from all around the world, long after I’m dead, to see my art in all its wonder.
Hey, it’s a nice thought, right?