HOW TO SELECT THE WORKS OF ARTS YOU PLAN TO WRITE ABOUT

Today I want to share a notes that may guide us to understand in writing the works of arts. Since I spent most of my time in a library, this is one from the book that I had read recently. Usually, I'll write the bibliography, but I totally forgot about it. So, I honestly and sincerely declare that some of the contains in this notes belong to the writer.

Sometimes, back home, I goes to the museum's art gallery. And, my college also got our own little art gallery in a hallway of library, where the student's works hang on the wall. Most of the artworks is an artwork for their course. 

We used to understand the works by their name. But, for me, there's no need for us to look at the name or the title actually. Some people may interpret different meaning from the artwork, and some people may have their own thoughts. This is why Jackson Pollock didn't used to give a title of his artwork. He don't want people biased by the title, he just want to deliver what is actually in his mind, and he want the people feel it from the artwork. 

And, this is what I always do. I used to stared at the artwork, and stand there for an hour. Might sounds crazy but, I really love how the artist express their emotion through it. Maybe some of us used to write about the artwork, so this is may help us how to write based on the artwork.

The book that I had read says :

Visiting Museums and Galleries

When you enter a museum, how do you feel, and do your feelings affect the way you see? This is not so much to ask whether you feel happy or sad, bored or confused- though your mood and temperament can obviously affect your perception of things, but whether the museum itself reminds you of a church or a library, a lecture hall or a department store. 

A museum, the must have felt, is most like itself.

For most people, the museum possess an aura, a mystique, that literally transforms the work of art. The museum removes art from the context of everyday life. People tend to take museums rather seriously, perhaps too seriously.

The art is anything but free, however, and this ambiguity, which is perhaps inevitable, repeats itself in various forms throughout our experience of it. For although the work of art is technically isolated from things that would interfere with our appreciation of it for its own sake and its own terms, it perpetually encounters a force ‘from the outside,’ one might say, a force that is always violating its sanctity. It is always meeting the enemy face to face, and it is us. 

Seeing art, then, as much as it is a critical operation, is a self-critical one as well. It involves, absolutely, examining our own prejudices and preconceptions. If the work of art seems distant from us, isolated there on the wall, that is so because, in a certain sense, it needs that protection. 

The work of art needs also to rise above whatever ignorance or misunderstanding we might initially bring to it, even if we aren’t about to abuse it physically. It needs to demand our respect.

The museum, in other words, is addressed to you. it wants to make art available to you, and it wants you to gather, from your experience, a greater understanding of and appreciation for what you’ve seen. Although the work of art, and the museum itself, might possess a certain aura of religiosity or sanctity, if we grant the art the respect that is its due, we are free to enter into dialogue with it, for, like the museum as a whole, each individual work is addressed to its audience, individually and collectively. If you do not allow yourself to be intimidated by the museum, and if you recognize the ways in which your own responses are being manipulated, sometimes to great advantage, by the museum itself, this dialogue can be particularly interesting and worthwhile.

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From the note above, it's clearly stated that the museum itself play their role in the artwork. And, yes, when I enter the museum, I can feel the mystique deep inside, a bit shivered. But, I'm not talking about ghost or whatsoever. When, I step inside the museum. I can feel the image, the emotion, that painted on the canvases. Ummpp... well, I guess it's better for me to show some of the artwork~

:: This is one of the artwork painted by the student in my college, the name that I have to remain secret. Credit to the artist (you know who you are). And, I do not own this::

~ when I first saw it. The leaves make me remember of one of novel that I had read; The Perfume by Patrick Suskind. The earthy color reminds me, when Grenouille can smell everything around him with close eyes. I don't know why it reminds me of the novel. When we look at the painting, we can see that the color were blend so well. Even though, this artwork were hang on the wall of the library's hallway, it travel me out, like a time piece that draw me out from the building to somewhere where all the leaves are on the earth's floor. The smell of woods,  and soil is everywhere. And I bet DAMP is the suitable word.~

So, when you decide to visit an art gallery or maybe museum, and haven't decide to choose an artwork, first of all, maybe you should take a look around, feel the aura from the place, gain your own thought, banish all the feeling inside, and empty your mind. Who guess, maybe your eyes will set you up with something that may remind you on something.