evacandra writes:

Hi. I do agree with what you had said about art. Art is great method to express our feeling, right?? By the way, your drawing is beautiful.

First, evacandra, thank you for the compliment.

Second, I guess what I’m trying to say is that art — or the making of art — certainly involves our emotions. But I’d say there’s more to it than that. What I was trying to say in one of the posts below is that art — the act of drawing or painting or writing or composing or dancing or whatever — requires effort. It is the effort of technical skills and focus and energy and time — and that it is this effort that produces good work.

We get confused, sometimes, when we look at a great painting, or watch a terrific movie, great acting, or watch dancers doing fantastic work, because part of this effort — usually — is making the effort look effortless. But it is effort.

This commitment to the effort is what I was talking about below when I said art is what we honor, and how well we honor it.

It takes time to figure out how to write sentences well: time spent over the long haul of years working with words, and over the short haul of writing and re-writing a specific sentence. When i do the work of writing I am honoring the act of communication, which I consider one of the most astounding acts of human behavior.

When I paint — when I take the time to study how shape and light and texture meet and interact within the boundary of a composition — I am honoring the substance of the world.

This honoring is an act of effort: The effort of study of the medium or the form of the art (such as color theory or use of brushstrokes); The effort of actual practice of the activity (such as specific painting); The effort of the thumbnail or rough sketch; The effort of judging the work in progress; the effort of re-working the painting, and so on…

Vincent van Gogh is often considered the “patron saint” of “art as feeling” kind of guy. But it’s important to remember that van Gogh put an immense amount of effort into his study of painting as well as each painting. He studied color theory, his notebooks are filled with comments about how colors work with each other. He experimented and made notes and came to UNDERSTAND how painting worked.

As Robert Hughes wrote:

It was van Gogh’s madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.

Is there emotion in his work? I don’t know. I really don’t. In the same way I don’t know if there’s emotion in the work of Rembrandt or Velázquez or Cezanne.

And yet — I do see is love — love of the paint, love of the form, love of the subjects. I know the love is there because someone took the time to do the art and craft of painting well. So, in that regard, art is an expression of our feelings. But it is revealed through the craft and the discipline and the effort we bring to bear.

[If you want see examples of work by the painters I've referenced, make sure to check out Mark Harden's Artchive!]