The Art Gallery

The Art Gallery

by Mark Fairchild

© Mark Fairchild, 2024

There is one universe that presents to us in an infinite number of ways. From that one universe, we create many realities very few of which, if any, are shared. This is the pith of art; its essence. When we look at a painting we, or some of us will ask, ” What was the artist's palate,” meaning what pigments were used to create all the colors found in the painting?

Yet everything has its palate. More to the point there is not only the artist's palate, whatever the media, there is also the palate that the viewer brings to the art.

An art gallery is filled to the brim with palates, of every sort. When I say “art,” I mean art of all media:

graphic (drawing, painting),

plastic (sculpture),

music, (orchestral, folk, popular, etc.)

movement (dance),

poetry (literature of all types),

stage (all performed storytelling)

with an audience; theatre, orchestral, cinema, story-telling,  puppeteering, carnivals, etc.; that is anything in which there exists immediate feedback between an audience and the performers, which informs and creates the art.

architectural (space),

gastronomic.

What the viewer brings to the art is much more complex than the media. These palates are phenomenological in nature (or perhaps anti-phenomenological, but that is for another essay); they involve not only objective reality but considerations other than objective reality. A great example of such analysis can be found in Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics Of Space.

The arts appeal to all of our senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, and tactile sensation; and yet we also bring to our perception, which is based on our senses, such things as memories, association, hopes, dreams, fears and phobias, and so on, In this sense every art . . . every experience . . .can be characterized as surreal in some fashion.

The painting of a cup can be humbling, erotic, terrifying, mundane, infused with hope, terror, or just run-of-the-mill unease . . . or the comfort of home and family, or a spring day in the sunlight. It can reflect wealth or poverty, the thought of illness or comfortable satiation, heat or cold, love or hate, spirituality or boredom. The same can be true of apples, rope, giants, spiders, men or women, mountains, and so on. The lists are endless; and all of it is informed by the artists use of the medium—blobs of paint, which can only mean it is all primarily the result of the viewer's subconscious mind.

A good art gallery is the ultimate assemblage of such experiences, especially when combined with a good bookstore. Every imaginable experience is to be found at such a world-class art display. Here we can experience not just every color, but every nuance of every color: every shade, every texture, every emotional temperature, depicted as every form revealing every relationship; some ultimately threatening, and some supremely comforting. It is from these “palates” that our personal realities are built and, more importantly, rebuilt.

Hence, art presents not to us from the world, so much as to ourselves from the world and our own minds, often initiated by someone elses' art as manifest in an artifact. Art evokes in us amazing potential, in its wonder, majesty, humor, and terror. Is it not a wonder that nearly every art has come to us from the realm of religion?