Assignment 16 - Claire Thompson

I’m here to make the case for art. Why you should care about art. Why I care about art. And, most importantly, why you should make art. It seems that many people, in their perspective of art and the power and meaning of art, are very narrow minded, provincial, and even ignorant. People think it’s just a pretty picture, period. And they don’t care. I can’t really blame people though; our art education largely ends after elementary school and when we do have art education, we aren’t truly taught about the multitude and magnitude of the power and the impact of art. This societal infliction is large setback to people’s understanding of not just art, but the world around them and themselves.
The painting behind me is a Mark Rothko, an abstract expressionist. Abstract expressionism was one of the first purely abstract and non-objective movements in art history. People who don’t have a background in art or art history often find art of this nature pretentious, shallow, even stupid. People think “oh I could do that.” They think it lacks any actual artistic skill. But little do people understand, art like this is powerful and has so much depth; this kind of art has multitudes. It is perfect synthetization of human emotion and the human condition onto canvas. Jackson Pollock—the artist who did the splatter paint—is probably the most famous abstract expressionist, and, much like Mark Rothko, was a depressed drunk whose art is indicative of this. Rothko’s art attacks the audience visually with such bold composition: the bold colors, the imperfection and chaos of it, and just the sheer size of these paintings are so imposing. Your guttural reaction to it, which is often of discomfort, anger, sadness, disgust, confusion, despair, or hopelessness are exactly the emotions Rothko wants you to feel. When you see a Rothko painting in person, it’s like staring into the void and it stares right back at you.
Ad Reinhardt, another abstract expressionist, once wrote, in a comic about how to understand art: “An abstract painting will react to you if you react to it. You get from it what you bring to it. It will meet you halfway but no further. It is alive if you are. It represents something and so do you. YOU, SIR, ARE A SPACE TOO.”
Rothko wrote a manuscript about how modern artists, as artists from about the 1940s-1960s, borrowed from primitive human art. If you think about cave paintings, they are not realistic. Rather, they are symbolic; they are meant to tell a story. Abstract paintings, like Rothko’s, do the same thing: they tell us about humanity and life and feeling. Realism is not the goal of art, and people need to break free of this binding concept. In this manuscript, Rothko also wrote about how children’s art is reactionary. They are mimicking the world around them. If you think about the nature of children’s art, it is so bizarre. Kids make art intuitively; they don’t think about it, they just do. They are not worried about how pretty it is, because, in their eyes, their art is incredible; it is their own world view perfectly synthesized on paper. We lose the ability to make art naturally and intuitively around the time we begin having formal art education, in which we are given rules and regulations and perimeters on how we should make art and what our subject matter should be.  We begin worrying about the realism of our art, how “good” it is. And when people don’t excel at this, they give up art almost completely for good.
But I believe that we have the ability to tap into this childhood capability.
Next time you are incredibly angry or sad or depressed, maybe you want to cry and scream or throw something, or maybe you’re really nervous because you have to give a speech as a final for your English class and you feel like you could vomit your guts out, sit down and pull out a piece of paper and just make lines. Don’t think about it, just draw. Scribble. I don’t mean just draw a girl crying because you’re sad, make something guttural and reactionary. Make something ugly! Hideous! Cry on the paper! Sneeze on it! Spit on it! Put your exact emotions onto paper! Do this every time you feel really deep or upsetting emotions. You will find, with practice, that this exercise can help you be better in touch with your emotions and with yourself. You will better be able to control and understand your emotions. Use art, not to make something necessarily pretty, but to help yourself.
Understanding art, and making it, will make you a more realized and full person. It will change your world.