The Superpower of a Painting is Invisibility
I move gingerly around the paintings I own because I know they are looking at me as closely as I am looking at them. There is a constant exchange of emotion between us, between the three of us: the artist I need never meet, the painting in its own right, and me, the one who loves it and can no longer live independent of it. The triangle of exchange alters, is fluid, is subtle, is profound and is one of those unverifiable facts that anyone who cares for painting soon discovers. The picture on my wall, art object and art process, is a living line of movement, a wave of colour that repercusses in my body, colouring it, colouring the new present, the future, and even the past which cannot now be considered outside the light of the painting. I think of something I did, the picture catches me, adds to the thought, changes the meaning of thought and past. The totality of the picture comments on the totality of what I am.1
The presence of a piece of art, a painting for instance, possesses something greater and more powerful than its appearance alone. Surely the formal qualities that comprise it are its most prominent, most readily noticed features. But, as Jeanette Winterson articulates, there is a “totality” of a painting that includes non-physical aspects that communicate directly with unseen elements of its viewer. Parts of the observer that are not the eyes participate in an exchange with the art object in a phenomenon that some liken to a spiritual experience.
Winterson, a celebrated author of contemporary fiction, shares her personal relationship with visual art. Hers, as that of a writer, is a relationship reliant on translated understanding; her natural creative language is words, not colours and forms. Perhaps it is her innate sensitivity, as an artist in her own right, that gives her such powers of observation. Or, perhaps, it is not observation, but a willingness to consider the presence of something intangible in a painting, something invisible that acts upon a viewer’s invisible parts.
The possibility of such an exchange, the transmission of affect, is a concept familiar to others who are immersed in the creative process. In Against Interpretation, another celebrated writer, Susan Sontag, refers to the connection between one's senses and one’s environment in a call to expose the negative effects of this reciprocal relationship.
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. … Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses.2
Whether or not we see (or sense) it, we are constantly being affected.
At first it seems like Sontag suggests that we fight sensory fire with sensory fire when she says, “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more”3. Upon careful consideration, however, her remedy for sensory overload induced ignorance of experience is intention. If we intentionally observe (and absorb) we may be able to hone our skills of observation (and absorption), and thus (re)gain some control over our lived and felt experience.
We are, after all, sensory creatures. We presently navigate a time when sociocultural unrest is amplified by news and social media, which is complicated by innumerable other external sources of stress on the body. Whether one’s personal history and emotional disposition predisposes their physiological response to the cumulative stimuli of the average day as anxiety or numbness, a balance needs to be struck. If it’s possible to learn how to mitigate our emotional response to external factors that are beyond our control (or even beyond our perception) by intentionally experiencing and savouring our reaction to a piece of art, a painting could be good medicine.
k.b.p.
1 Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1995), 19.
2 Sontag, 13.
3 Sontag, 14.
