If art is a lie that helps us know the truth, then I have a theory to go with that lie. Its not a new theory, but I hope its the same kind of lie.
Look at a photo of a face, any face, and you'll see one eye is not looking back at you. We call this a person's dead eye. We all have them. Yet, I would propose it isn't dead at all, but instead of looking out, it is actually looking in.
You're squinting. Stay with me here. Cats are real obvious. Stroke one and watch it's pupils dilate with every stroke. We're the same way .Our pupils open up when we are looking at something we like, and constrict when we're not happy with what we see. Our eyes constrict when we lie or if we think we are being lied to. That's why we say,"Look me in the eye and say that." Our eyes tell everything.
So about this dead eye. For every minute of your waking life, your attention is directed outside of yourself for only seconds, and then you are looking in to make sense of what you just saw, and then you look out again, and back in. If we didn't do this, we would be like cameras, only recording what was in front of us without trying to make sense of it. Some of us spend more time looking out than in. Others of us seem unable to look out much at all.
So what do you see when you look in? A clue would seem to be that if we shut both eyes, we eventually end up dreaming. Then with one eye looking out and the other looking in, are we experiencing half of a dream? I would say yes. Your experience of the world is necessarily funneled through your inner content, your interests, your fears, your blood sugar level... You can never know what the world really looks like, separate from your own personally shaped perceptions.
And this is the realm of art. Unlike normal people, artists, (yes I said it) are those of us driven to express this "inside world" that has been brought on by this "outside world. Art is the physical embodiment of our attempts to express our own personal "inside worlds." These expressions then become part of the "outside world" , and are quickly observed and absorbed onto other artists "inside worlds", to become...
Inhale, exhale. The ebb and flow of creative minds. We could not separate ourselves from this process if we wanted to. Not only, as Emerson said, does the earth laugh flowers, it also laughs us, the artists who paint and photograph them.
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