I went to lunch today with some friends. Afterwards we went walking. On our walk we came by an art gallery, which we entered. Inside was arrayed a variety of Aboriginal art. Most of it was the familiar dot paintings, but it varied in colour and in style. I moved from painting to painting, taking in the vibrant colours and studying keenly the subtlety in design and in texture. The best of them had a mesmerising quality. It was ike you could look into them for hours on end and continue to see different things. Some had an almost electric quality, drawing you into the canvas as if it possessed a third dimension.
It occurred to me that while much of Aboriginal art is striking and beautiful, its quality goes much beyond that. From my limited understanding, these represent tales from the dreamtime. They vary from tribe to tribe, but each is a story passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years. Each painting depicts in it's unique style this story, rendered through the artists imagination and put on canvas in a style unique to this culture. There is then this very deep spiritual connection between the stories and this heritage, and the representation of it - and perhaps then with the man standing in a gallery beholding it.
So, I stood mesmerised, and wondered if what I saw and what I felt was something more than just art - more than dots of paint upon a canvas. Maybe it sounds mystical, but I think that in the best of art of any description there is something in that. Art can be mere decoration - or it can stir and reverbrate in ways perhaps we do not understand. I have always thought that much of this is pure instinct, vague ancestral memories stirred by images or sounds in ways we cannot begin to understand - but which are unfailing in responding to. You know the feeling.
It is harder maybe with the visual arts. You can look upon a landscape literally rendered and see a cluster of trees and waterfall under a blue sky, and that's all there is. Or you can see a Turner say, another scene as such, but this one all colour and light and tumult that rouses in us a sense of wonder and perhaps dim recognition. Then you stand before an abstract, strange shapes and colours arrayed upon the canvas to some rhyme that seems to exist only in the artists mind - and yet as you look upon the best of it there is a sense of shifting perspective I think, as if you can see beyond the splashes of paint into a deeper layer beyond that. And it seems like you see then at a much deeper level, and more directly, from inside rather than through the eyes, there is a direct communion between this deeper layer and that part deep inside you that has knowledge of it. Knowledge maybe, but not understanding - and that is the wonder, and that is the purpose.
I feel like I'm waffling on sounding silly, but this is my experience of art, not always, but often, and these words come directly from that rather than my head. What I have written here is 'unthought', it is the visceral response scraped clean.
Anyway, by a strange coincidence I discussed last week buying a piece of Aboriginal art by a young artist. I do this for the long term investment, but there is nothing I will buy that I won't hang upon my walls. I'm not sure as yet if I will buy or not, but hope I will.
