In the way other people’s minds probably do, mine moved along a band of topics in the middle of the night like radio stations or a wheel at the fair, a big arrow that stops and settles.
That’s how it went, a million nights staggering to the toilet and back again noting the time, hoping sleep would take me back, my forgiving lover.
They were like that, the days: an icy trail but a patchwork of matted leaves that keeps you from slipping. A non-alcoholic beer because symbols for me are enough. The Starbucks logo in a window in Stuttgart made to look like a woodcut, waiting to meet a blogger friend and how it looked like a mask, a face on the moon.
On the train back to our village how the rain turned to snow and I wrote about it, and that made it bigger somehow.
And if painters get a feeling from a landscape, and it’s likely (or impossible otherwise) they’re the only ones who will know exactly what it felt like to be there, then it becomes some funny little secret between the two of them, a moment that got elevated.
And others see weird things in the painting you wouldn’t expect, maybe it’s what they needed to see.
And if the painting’s done its job to stop someone and move them for a minute and they see something utterly odd and unimaginable, maybe it’s proven itself real then, just like the landscape.
Bill Pearse 
art is unique to each individual who experiences it.
LikeLike
Amen to that!
LikeLike
Just watched the Mike Leigh biopic about JMW Turner starring Timothy Spall as Turner. Leigh uses a part-improvise approach with his actors, so each scene feels real and natural even if it really isn’t. Just the way Turner moved through society, mixing with gentry, royalty, sailors and prostitutes, invisible to most, using assumed names during the height of his fame – your words reminded me of watching that, of Turner’s unique way of seeing and capturing the world (at once not the way a camera would see it and yet sort of how your mind might see it) which only made real sense at the 20th century dawned and the world was different.
Great way of expressing what art is
LikeLike