Earliest Art Experience
January 2013
The memory is a little foggy--bits and pieces that flash and focus like quick snippets of a vintage film. It’s one of the earliest moments I can remember as a child. However broken, each piece is still very vivid with a strong feeling of the senses and their presence. I can feel my toes spread out before me and reach to touch them. I can see the white knuckled two year old fist clutching a paint brush dipped in thick black paint. I smell the tacky scent of paint; hear the crackle of the newspaper flushed out on the floor. Then with a determined gaze I bend to paint my toes with the brush, delighting in the way the brush feels and how it leaves a wide, messy trail of paint along the ridge of my toes. I don’t remember why I was cropped on the floor or where the paper was that my parents must have set out to paint on. But I can still remember the joy in this self-recognition of senses in this experience—what a brush feels like and how a visual mark is created. I think the reason this broken memory of a young painter had sticky-noted itself to the back of my brain is that it became the light-bulb moment in my little child mind: not only that I could make these marks, but that it in doing so, I became very happy. I vaguely understood the power the senses have on self.
As I have continued to grow, I can still appreciate the alert role each of the senses have in the world, art and life. Many of our most powerful emotions stem from comfort or discomfort of the senses. We may find self-satisfaction in the salty, buttery depths of a bowl of popcorn. Or perhaps we find a startling sense of aloneness in the sound of a child’s wail—whatever emotion they may provoke senses control what and how we feel. With this notion in mind, art, with its illuminating imagery and provocation of color, has a very strong influence in the world. Just as smell, taste, feel or sound can evoke a powerful emotion so can sight and imagery. Ultimately, we can find joy in looking at the image as well as in creating it. This broken childhood memory of realizing of the link between the senses and art continues to remind me of how art functions in the grown up world
January 2013
The memory is a little foggy--bits and pieces that flash and focus like quick snippets of a vintage film. It’s one of the earliest moments I can remember as a child. However broken, each piece is still very vivid with a strong feeling of the senses and their presence. I can feel my toes spread out before me and reach to touch them. I can see the white knuckled two year old fist clutching a paint brush dipped in thick black paint. I smell the tacky scent of paint; hear the crackle of the newspaper flushed out on the floor. Then with a determined gaze I bend to paint my toes with the brush, delighting in the way the brush feels and how it leaves a wide, messy trail of paint along the ridge of my toes. I don’t remember why I was cropped on the floor or where the paper was that my parents must have set out to paint on. But I can still remember the joy in this self-recognition of senses in this experience—what a brush feels like and how a visual mark is created. I think the reason this broken memory of a young painter had sticky-noted itself to the back of my brain is that it became the light-bulb moment in my little child mind: not only that I could make these marks, but that it in doing so, I became very happy. I vaguely understood the power the senses have on self.
As I have continued to grow, I can still appreciate the alert role each of the senses have in the world, art and life. Many of our most powerful emotions stem from comfort or discomfort of the senses. We may find self-satisfaction in the salty, buttery depths of a bowl of popcorn. Or perhaps we find a startling sense of aloneness in the sound of a child’s wail—whatever emotion they may provoke senses control what and how we feel. With this notion in mind, art, with its illuminating imagery and provocation of color, has a very strong influence in the world. Just as smell, taste, feel or sound can evoke a powerful emotion so can sight and imagery. Ultimately, we can find joy in looking at the image as well as in creating it. This broken childhood memory of realizing of the link between the senses and art continues to remind me of how art functions in the grown up world