Monday, September 29, 2014

Jet Li and Jack Ma on Taiji Zen


I believe ancient Chinese culture has some simple wisdom to share with us: balance.
Jet Li is a well-known martial artist, actor and producer, while Jack Ma is the billionaire founder of Alibaba which recently had the largest Initial Public Offering.  Together they arrive at Taiji Zen.  The video lessons are clear and informative, and shot and scored deftly.

Jet Li introduces Taiji Zen, and welcomes us.


Friday, September 19, 2014

Art has Value


Preface

As Dr. Ron Art took sufficient shape for me to launch it via a Facebook page three years ago, I wanted to share my Art Manifesto.  This manifesto isn't just a set of beliefs about art, but also a proposal about the very nature of art.  Physicists work at discovering the immutable laws of the universe, and in a similar way I work at crystallizing some fundamental truths about art.  More broadly, art is an integral component of The Tripartite Model, along with science and religion.

My Art Manifesto
  1. Art is cross-art by nature
  2. Art is always autobiographical
  3. Art is sensuous
  4. Art is synesthetic
  5. Art is never completely original
  6. Art has value
Dr. Ron Art is a sizable complex with five main wings, under which several projects are at various stages of progress:
My Art Manifesto is the undercurrent for these projects.  This is the last of six articles, where I introduce this manifesto. 



(image credit)
A talented artist friend

When I lived in Dubai, a Filipino friend invited me to his first solo exhibition.  His paintings were astounding, both in breadth (they were huge) and in theme (they were profound).  His creative talent wasn't narrowed to painting, but extended to photography, sculpting and performance.  At this exhibition, for instance, we all wondered where the hell he was.  Two hours into it, and he still hadn't shown up.  Then he arrived, wearing exactly what he wore in a sizable self portrait, including clown makeup, and pulling the same red wagon depicted in that photograph.  He was like the Pied Piper, as he snaked through the crowd, picking up odd things on the floor, and us opening up, making way for him, and regathering behind him to follow along.  It was a tour de force show.

I was equally astonished, however, at how much he low-balled the pricing of his pieces.  It was par for the course for a lot of Filipinos in Dubai, that they hardly saw their true worth and hardly demanded it.  They smiled at whatever pittance they received, because after all they were the happiest people in the world.  But being dead bottom on the salary scale in an Arabian Business survey was emblematic, I thought, of how people and companies took advantage of their low salary expectations and how Filipinos themselves reinforced it with their acceptance and passivity. 

On the face of it, my artist friend was the same.  So a few days later, I got together with him, and asked him point black: If someone were to offer him 10 - 20 times more than the pricing he had set for any of his pieces, would he accept it?  I was glad to hear his response:  yes.  I wanted to advocate for him and to serve as his talent agent, and his response suggested that we had something to work with.  Had he said no, instead, there would have been little reason for us to go forward.

Art as the royal road to wealth

Consider the following documentary on very expensive paintings:


If this documentary doesn't take your breath away, then you may have little or no breath to begin with.  Certainly each artist may dream of a multimillion dollar windfall for his or her art.  For the vast lot of us, however, eking a living out of what we love most is a daily struggle or an impractical option altogether.

But how to determine art value?

A few years ago I spoke to a German friend, who at the time was pursuing her PhD in marketing and focusing on pricing as a specialty.  I asked her how the value of art was determined.  We chatted a bit, but mostly she just sent me a wealth of articles on the subject.  Evidently art pricing wasn't something she had looked into, as she really wasn't able to advise me.

I gathered the following were pricing determinants:
  • Talent and renown of the artist
  • Promotion, sales and marketing efforts
  • Historical, social and political context
  • Art market trends for particular genres
  • Whim, ego and wealth of the art aficionado-collector
Over time, as my thinking advances and my knowledge grows, I will elaborate on these and other determinants. 

Dr. Ron Art in perspective

It took a few years to clarify the concept, create the platform, and launch it in earnest.  So when I spoke to the foregoing friends, this wide-ranging endeavor was still in its infancy.  I wanted to create art and engage others, but I also wanted to promote, negotiate and sell it.  (a) I've been posting stuff in methodic fashion, across Google+, Twitter and Facebook, and (b) writing articles like mad across several Blogger, Tumblr and Pinterest profiles.  (c) Plus I am working on specific projects, at various stages of progress:
  • Poetry in Multimedia.  Searching for a multimedia publisher for `The Song Poems
  • Shakespeare Talks!  Staging `A Midsummer Night's Dream in the community
  • Dramatis Personae.  Writing my play `The Room, as advocacy against housemaid abuse
  • Art Intersections.  Planning my photography project `Real Beauty
  • T'ai Chi Empower.  Teaching students and coaching leaders on T'ai Chi  
I'm not yet at the point of formulating the pricing for whatever I'm going to sell, but I'm getting there, for sure. I have struggled, admittedly, and that may continue, but for me there is little that is ennobling about struggling or suffering. I appreciate its inevitability, and I do my best to learn from it. But I plan to get past it and delve even more into art, and I plan to become wealthy at it.   

Art is simply not something to dish out for nothing.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Art is Never Completely Original


Preface

As Dr. Ron Art took sufficient shape for me to launch it via a Facebook page three years ago, I wanted to share my Art Manifesto.  This manifesto isn't just a set of beliefs about art, but also a proposal about the very nature of art.  Physicists work at discovering the immutable laws of the universe, and in a similar way I work at crystallizing some fundamental truths about art.  More broadly, art is an integral component of The Tripartite Model, along with science and religion.

My Art Manifesto
  1. Art is cross-art by nature
  2. Art is always autobiographical
  3. Art is sensuous
  4. Art is synesthetic
  5. Art is never completely original
  6. Art has value
Dr. Ron Art is a sizable complex with five main wings, under which several projects are at various stages of progress:
My Art Manifesto is the undercurrent for these projects.  This is the fifth of six articles, where I introduce this manifesto. 



The four points I've written about so far in my Art Manifesto - (a) art is cross-art by nature, (b) art is always autobiographical, (c) art is sensuous, and (d) art is synesthetic - came to me five years ago, but this fifth is a recent inclusion.  I crystallize it here.

We are all inviolably connected to each other, and we belong on long, billowing ribbons of life, since the beginning of life itself.  So while we may pull things together in a novel fashion, while we may take a radical leap of creativity, and while our work may strike others as duly original, the fact is we are never fully alone or isolated from others in the world.  Our art may be original to some extent, but never completely so. 

Literature

Consider the famous reflection by the English poet and cleric John Donne (Meditation XVII):
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
American novelist Ernest Hemingway drew from Donne for the title From Whom the Bells Tolls.  William Shakespeare, Donne's contemporary in the late-16th, early-17th centuries, drew quite a bit from his predecessors, and they from their predecessors, too, for instance, for `Romeo and Juliet:
  • The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke, and Palace of Pleasure by William Painter were primary sources. 
  • In turn, for his narrative poem, Brooke may have translated the Italian novella Giuletta e Romeo by Matteo Bandello.
  • There are characters named Reomeo Titensus and Juliet Bibleotet in the works by Pierre Boaistuau, who translated some of Bandello's novellas into French, such as Histoire troisieme de deux Amants, don't l'un mourut de venin, l'autre de tristesse (The third story of two lovers, one of whom died of poison, the other of sadness, rf. A Noise Within).
  • One Bandello story was La sfortunata morte di dui infelicissimi amante che l'uno di veleno e l'atro di dolore morirono (The unfortunate death of two most wretched lovers, one of whom died of poison, the other, of grief, rf. A Noise Within).
So one of the most famous works in literature and theater follows quite a lineage of art.

Film


`Stoker is very stylish 2013 film by South Korean director Park Chan-wook, and in its simplest, most obvious theme it is about the coming of age of a young lady.  But it's more complex than that, and quite a lot move and shift in the interiors of this family.  The acting - led by Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, and Nicole Kidman - is simply superb. 

For the purpose of this article, I want to highlight American film talent Wentworth Miller, the screenwriter for `Stoker.  The name didn't ring a bell to me.  But because I love film, and I am obsessively curious about the background and crew, I Googled him.  I found out that he played the younger Coleman Silk in another beautiful, very curious 2003 film The Human Stain, also starring Kidman and Anthony Hopkins.
[Miller] used the pseudonym Ted Foulke for submitting his work, later explaining "I just wanted the scripts to sink or swim on their own."  Miller's script was voted to the 2010 "Black List" of the 10 best unproduced screenplays then making the rounds in Hollywood.  Miller described it as a "horror film, a family drama and a psychological thriller".  Although influenced by Bram Stoker's Dracula, Miller clarified that Stoker was "not about vampires.  It was never meant to be about vampires but it is a horror story. A stoker is one who stokes, which also ties in nicely with the narrative."  Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt also influenced the film. Miller said: "The jumping-off point is actually Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. So, that's where we begin, and then we take it in a very, very different direction."
Reference:  Stoker.  

I have been enthralled with `Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) for a long time.  I watched that Hitchcock film (1943), and it too was superb.  I'm sure the inspiration for Miller is a bit more intricate than we can know, but an evocative name like "Stoker" and a conniving character like Uncle Charlie are the threads that stitch Miller to his creative predecessors.

  
Poetry

The influences to my poetry are many, but Shakespeare, and poets WH Auden and John Ashbery are prominent.  For example, my latest poem - Swan Song of Ophelia - is about one of the most tender yet enigmatic women in ShakespeareAuden wrote a breathtaking commentary on The Tempest, titled `The Sea and the Mirror, which in turn inspired me to write a long poem about a patient I worked with, who committed suicide.  Ashbery, along with surrealist painter Salvador Dali and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, were instrumental to the poetry I wrote in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

But let's take one from my collection The Song Poems.  The idea is simple:  I take any music video I like from YouTube, then I let it take me wherever it wishes to take me.  These poems are an account of these journeys.


The following are the specific music videos that inspired me to write this song poem:

  

Nowadays social media, technology devices, and digital content all extend and tighten the ties that connect us to one another.  What I've captured here is just a small sampling of my argument that art is never completely original.  To come back to Donne, none of us is an island onto himself or herself.  There is no person born and raised in complete isolation, and biologically we are forever bound to our parents.   

Art simply gives us the means, the knowledge, and the opportunity to do what creative thing we wish to do with whatever and whoever came before us.

Monday, September 15, 2014

Art is Synesthetic


Preface

As Dr. Ron Art took sufficient shape for me to launch it via a Facebook page three years ago, I wanted to share my Art Manifesto.  This manifesto isn't just a set of beliefs about art, but also a proposal about the very nature of art.  Physicists work at discovering the immutable laws of the universe, and in a similar way I work at crystallizing some fundamental truths about art.  More broadly, art is an integral component of The Tripartite Model, along with science and religion.

My Art Manifesto
  1. Art is cross-art by nature
  2. Art is always autobiographical
  3. Art is sensuous
  4. Art is synesthetic
  5. Art is never completely original
  6. Art has value
Dr. Ron Art is a sizable complex with five main wings, under which several projects are at various stages of progress:
My Art Manifesto is the undercurrent for these projects.  This is the fourth of six articles, where I introduce this manifesto. 



I have this pet idea that (a) we work at art is sensuous, that is, heightening our five senses for any stimuli around us.  Then (b) we cross the usual pairing of sense and stimulus, and now it's art is synesthetic Synesthesia is a neurological condition, where sense-stimulus pairings are scrambled, for example, hearing colors or seeing music.
Some synesthetes often report that they were unaware their experiences were unusual until they realized other people did not have them, while others report feeling as if they had been keeping a secret their entire lives.  The automatic and ineffable nature of a synesthetic experience means that the pairing may not seem out of the ordinary. This involuntary and consistent nature helps define synesthesia as a real experience. Most synesthetes report that their experiences are pleasant or neutral, although, in rare cases, synesthetes report that their experiences can lead to a degree of sensory overload.

Though often stereotyped in the popular media as a medical condition or neurological aberration, many synesthetes themselves do not perceive their synesthetic experiences as a handicap. To the contrary, some report it as a gift—an additional "hidden" sense—something they would not want to miss. Most synesthetes become aware of their distinctive mode of perception in their childhood. Some have learned how to apply their ability in daily life and work. Synesthetes have used their abilities in memorization of names and telephone numbers, mental arithmetic, and more complex creative activities like producing visual art, music, and theater.
Reference: Synesthesia.


That's stupid.  Numbers don't have colors, they have personalities!
Of course, synesthesia isn't the purview of art alone.  I love what Alex relates at the end: Fellow synesthetes have very different orientations to numbers, so their gatherings have the makings of a friendly fight.

I don't view synesthesia as a medical problem, though it can be, if a person is disturbed by it and it affects his or her day-to-day functioning.  By and large, though, synesthetes who may or may not be artists clearly find it pleasant and normal.  I imagine that in general established artists or would-be artists have a greater degree of synesthesia than non-artists. 

Imagine the creative possibilities

Five years ago I was at Happy Hour with a couple of friends in Dubai, and I must've mentioned synesthesia.  They didn't know what it was, so I explained it and mentioned it as a hallmark of art.  I met them in an acting class, so like me they were artistic sorts and they were duly intrigued by its being an art manifesto.

I promised to write a poem about it:

They say, true synesthesia is involuntary –
Like twitch of muscle fibers, firing of nerve cells,
Molecular activity of momentary
But frequent ringing of cross-stimulating bells.

But I do not conceive this as neurologists
For science claims too much of human mantelpiece,
Or relegate to armchairs of psychologists
(Though I am one) this cross-emotional release.

So, dear, who truly owns this synesthesic power?
The artist!  Let’s begin with sight.  For eyes have might
To hear the music in Picasso, feel the hour
Shorten upon the skin from images at night. 

Consider hearing.  Enter Mozart opera –
“The Magic Flute” singspiel that is a rousing texture
On fingertips, a harlequin to camera
Of colors from dramatic notes-and-words admixture.

Now, smell.  The fragrant hyacinths across the field
May give rise to a spread of roasted lamb, merlot
And crème brûlée – for flavor is as much the yield
Of fragrance as of succulence, tied with a bow.

Taste, then.  Cold water on the palate in the heat
Of equatorial summers is to bathe in springs
Collecting from the mountaintops, down to their feet,
Where rushing, falling is what water also sings. 
 
Last but not least, is touch.  For lovers, all the world
Is synesthesia.  Were they simply left alone
To stroke each other’s face, we’d see the cherubs twirl,
Hear oud play, breathe perfume, lap Häagen-Dazs’s cone.   

So, there, the sensual artist is the king and queen,
Whose living fully rules each momentary scene.

Synesthesia © Ron Villejo

So how about synesthesia in short film, music video, and training and education?


I love the bits about listening to fruits and vegetables, meat and eggs, then himself.  Toasting, cooking and eating books.  Herds of cats coming out of the speakers.


The lyrics and singing are terrible, but the visuals and music are catchy.  The Hindu holiday of Holi - the festival of colors - is a nice touch.


I like the notion of metaphor as seeing the similar in dissimilar things.  But imagine the work of researchers in synesthesia, applied as training and education for all art students.  There is evidence that our brain is very plastic, that is, pliable and changeable.  So we could adopt neurological applications for children, teenagers and adults, and thereby build up their artistry, creativity and innovation, and reshape their (our) brain for a meaningful good. 

Friday, September 5, 2014

Art is Sensuous


Preface

As Dr. Ron Art took sufficient shape for me to launch it via a Facebook page three years ago, I wanted to share my Art Manifesto.  This manifesto isn't just a set of beliefs about art, but also a proposal about the very nature of art.  Physicists work at discovering the immutable laws of the universe, and in a similar way I work at crystallizing some fundamental truths about art.  More broadly, art is an integral component of The Tripartite Model, along with science and religion.

My Art Manifesto
  1. Art is cross-art by nature
  2. Art is always autobiographical
  3. Art is sensuous
  4. Art is synesthetic
  5. Art is never completely original
  6. Art has value
Dr. Ron Art is a sizable complex with five main wings, under which several projects are at various stages of progress:
My Art Manifesto is the undercurrent for these projects. This is the third of six articles, where I introduce this manifesto.



Touch

Nicholas Cage as Seth and Meg Ryan as Maggie in `City of Angels (1998) have a moment at the library.  She feels him hold her hand and run a finger on her palm.  She had questioned his feeling that she was an excellent doctor, and had tacitly dismissed such praise from the stranger.  In one regard, this beautiful, poignant film is her story, she who is first baffled and skeptical, then shifts from science (analytical and skeptical) to art (experiential and authentic).  At the end, she glides on a kind of ribbon of religion, where she lives life fully, with the wind in her hair and the sun on her face.


Taste
As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste... as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy. 
From a passage in A Moveable Feast, by Earnest Hemingway, which Seth reads.

Sight

There is quite a lot in the following clip from `A Beautiful Mind (2001), where Russell Crowe as John and Jennifer Connelly as Alicia go a first date.  The visuals in general are arresting.  But if we believe that God is truly an artist, then the visuals of a Marc Chagall painting are as transcendent as Alicia sees it and also as stunning as she is.  At her behest, the geeky genius John sees a certain artistry in the cosmos. 


Self Portrait with Seven Fingers (1913), by Marc Chagall
Sound

Charlotte Church sings `All You Can Be, as the love theme, in a hauntingly beautiful voice.  In fact, the soundtrack James Horner is in and of itself sensuous. 


Scent

`Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is an unfortunate title for this lush and lavish 2006 film.  Indeed Ben Whishaw as Jean-Baptiste Grenouille does kill, in an effort to capture the intoxicating but elusive scent of a woman.  But his killings are simply one part of a rich story about his ungodly heightened sense of smell.  In reality, of course, we as the audience do not smell what he smells.  But through the filmmaker's craft and our imagination, it was quite easy for us to smell all that captivated Jean-Baptiste.


Finally, my poem on a stunningly fragrant, long lasting Casablanca Lily:


Not all pieces of art will engage our five senses equally.  But if we give free reign to all of our senses, then art as a whole rewards us with an inviolably sensuous experience.

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Art is Always Autobiographical


Preface

As Dr. Ron Art took sufficient shape for me to launch it via a Facebook page three years ago, I wanted to share my Art Manifesto.  This manifesto isn't just a set of beliefs about art, but also a proposal about the very nature of art.  Physicists work at discovering the immutable laws of the universe, and in a similar way I work at crystallizing some fundamental truths about art.  More broadly, art is an integral component of The Tripartite Model, along with science and religion.

My Art Manifesto
  1. Art is cross-art by nature
  2. Art is always autobiographical
  3. Art is sensuous
  4. Art is synesthetic
  5. Art is never completely original
  6. Art has value
Dr. Ron Art is a sizable complex with five main wings, under which several projects are at various stages of progress:
My Art Manifesto is the undercurrent for these projects.  This is the second of six articles, where I introduce this manifesto.



Art draws from experience

The 2006 film `Open Window stars Robin Tunney as Izzy and Joel Edgerton as her fiance Peter.  Theirs is a down-to-earth, genuinely loving relationship, but when a stranger enters through a window she left ajar, and rapes her, their lives turn inside-out and upside-down.  The film was so disregarded that there wasn't even a Wikipedia entry, but nevertheless I found it emotionally powerful and artistically compelling.
   
Here is the story of its writer and director:
One night in 1989, Mia Goldman awakened to find a menacing stranger sitting on top of her, ordering her to keep her mouth shut or he would "shoot [her] brains out" with a gun he had placed on a nightstand.

At the time, Goldman, a film editor, was living in a two-story condominium in rural Virginia, on location with the film, "Crazy People." Her assailant revealed that he knew she was working on the movie, that he had been stalking her and that he had entered the condo through a downstairs window she had left open a crack for air.

Over the next five hours, he brutally raped, tortured and beat Goldman, covering her body with bruises and injuring her neck. In the aftermath, she developed a heart murmur, endured cervical surgeries, experienced flashbacks and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome and lost her boyfriend, who had tried to be kind but ultimately could not deal with his own feelings of trauma and violation.

Goldman says it took her six years to work through her depression and to heal, which she did with the help of her psychoanalyst, her family and her growing spiritual connection to Judaism. She drew on her experience to write and direct her debut feature, "Open Window," which premieres on Showtime July 16 at 8 p.m.

The intense, intimate drama revolves around Izzy (Robin Tunney), a struggling photographer, Izzy's fiancé, Peter (Joel Edgerton), and how their relationship unravels after she is raped by a man who enters her studio through an open window.

Both Izzy and Peter are devastated by the rape: "I wanted to show how the act violates not only the woman, but also the man -- and how it creates circles of pain that may extend to the entire family," Goldman says.
Reference:  Mia Goldman’s film is an ‘Open Window’ into trauma and recovery.

Art draws on empathy

I first heard of Rodrigo García as the director of the mysterious 2008 film Passengers, starring Anne Hathaway as Claire and Patrick Wilson as Eric, among unlikely survivors of a horrific airplane crash. It was a box office bomb, but I found it to be a well-scripted, well-acted, imaginative albeit creepy story of the after-life.

Breaking new ground with award-winning scripted dramas for the digital age
When I stumbled on the WIGS channel on YouTube, I was already acquainted with co-creator García.  I found myself enthralled with the fine, sensitive, empathic portrayal of women.  In fact all of the WIGS films are titled simply by the names of the women who lead a range of stories.  My favorite among all of them is the story of `Blue, with Julia Stiles, who struggles with a turbulent past of addiction and a double-life now as a mother and a call girl.  García's writing and directing are just brilliant.  Though it isn't a perfect effort for him, I'd definitely vouch for the fact that he nails these women roles:
Glenn [Close], whom we interviewed after our chat with Rodrigo, theorized why the director excels in creating absorbing female characters: “Rodrigo has a wonderful mother and had a wonderful grandmother. I think he has a very strong wife (Dawn Hudson, executive director of Independent Filmmaker Project/West) and he has two daughters. He’s surrounded by women. He probably would say he has no choice. I’ve been in his first two movies. He writes fantastic roles for women. He’s a man who understands the feminine side of life and revels in what all that means.

When he was told that actresses he has directed often talk about his great insight and sensibility toward women, Rodrigo cracked with a smile: “I hear my wife laughing right now.”

But he admitted to having “What feels to me like a very strong imagination. I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, but when I imagine the women characters that I write about, I feel them very strongly in my head. I’m glad that so many women respond to them. If they didn’t, I would have given it up a long time ago. One of the things that feeds me to keep writing women is that a lot of women connect with them. But it’s always a bit of a prayer. I am not saying, ‘Oh, I’m going to nail this one. This is what this woman is like.’ I have to go with my instinct and, like I said before, I just assume she has to be a little bit like me. She must. She wants things.

He said that one of the best things he has read on this topic was when Gustave Flaubert was asked who was Madame Bovary. Rodrigo said, “Flaubert said, ‘Madame Bovary is me.’ We make movies about other men. We make movies about people in other periods, people in outer space or who’ve gone to space, fired a gun, been on a horse. Imagination – you have to have that as storytellers. Plus empathy to feel that everyone else is me and that I am everyone else. There’s a particular set of circumstances around Nobbs. She had to hide to survive but everyone hides an aspect of themselves in order to fit in and survive.”
Reference: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s son on the art of storytelling

All men have been around women in one way or another, of course. So while Close's theory sounds quite reasonable, García probably draws on more than just personal experience.  I think he also taps his empathic understanding of women to make such breathtaking, compelling art. It is empathy - psychologically putting yourself in others' shoes - that he draws from most, and his films speak to his personal instinct, grasp and imagination. 

Art draws on imagination

Vincent Van Gogh is one of my longtime favorites, and more than three decades after my university days, impressionism as a genre still draws me.  The story goes that his friend and fellow painter Paul Gauguin advised him to paint from his imagination, that is, instead of reality.   While Van Gogh admired him, and paid lip service to his mentoring, he demured.  The deeply talented Dutchman preferred instead to paint scenes he saw in front of him, such as the following:

Bedroom in Arles (1888)
Then while in an asylum in Saint-Rémy, he didn't have his usual access to places that inspired him.  But inspired, he still was.  While there was an identifiable view of the following painting, that is, outside the east-facing window of his room, he apparently painted it during the daytime and in a different place at the asylum.  He painted it from memory, in other words, and the idyllic village in background and the bold fire strokes of the moon, stars and sky were his imaginative rendition.  
Starry Night (1889)
Bedroom in Arles and Starry Night are among the things that Van Gogh saw.  They speak to his remarkable ability not just to paint, but also to keep his dysphoria, delusions and torment under artistic control.  Besides imagination, there is emotionality to these paintings, which, pat psychiatric diagnoses notwithstanding, speak to a far greater complexity, richness and talent.

So just as Madame Bovary is Flaubert, and Blue is García, so Arles and Saint-Rémy are unmistakably Van Gogh. 

The foregoing works of art tell remarkable stories about the personal experience, empathy and imagination of the artists behind them.

Monday, September 1, 2014

Art is Cross-Art by Nature


Preface

As Dr. Ron Art took sufficient shape for me to launch it via a Facebook page three years ago, I wanted to share my Art Manifesto.  This manifesto isn't just a set of beliefs about art, but also a proposal about the very nature of art.  Physicists work at discovering the immutable laws of the universe, and in a similar way I work at crystallizing some fundamental truths about art.  More broadly, art is an integral component of The Tripartite Model, along with science and religion.

My Art Manifesto
  1. Art is cross-art by nature
  2. Art is always autobiographical
  3. Art is sensuous
  4. Art is synesthetic
  5. Art is never completely original
  6. Art has value
Dr. Ron Art is a sizable complex with five main wings, under which several projects are at various stages of progress:
My Art Manifesto is the undercurrent for these projects.  This is the first of six articles, where I introduce this manifesto.


 

I take umbrage at those who define art only as paintings.  Certainly what painters render from their imagination, onto canvas, is a work of wonder. But they aren't the only artists we can speak of.  Poets and novelists | playwrights, filmmakers and actors | dancers and musicians | even martial artists and fashion designers | and so many more | belong in this enormous circle, too.

Art speaks to a wide range of creative talent, genres and expressions.

Moreover, they all have a play on that canvas, which I see as a metaphor for any art creation. That canvas can be a video, a book, or a stage.  Social media is the wide-ranging, modern day platform we have come to know, but the tried-and-true media of TV, radio and print are very much alive and kicking.  Not just one, then, but multiple avenues, through which inspired artists can express themselves and also through which art aficionados can enjoy their work.

Art can play on a diverse set of media platforms and channels.

Consider the following:

  
You see, these two videos aren't just dance, but also an intimate, intricate coming together of music, drama and cinematography.  There is something supreme to experience, when we watch ballet live, which makes theater so much more of a draw than any other media.  Yet, that stage production cannot account for the creative versatility of film.  The cuts from Polina Semionova gliding in the air, to her sylph legs and feet; or from the pas de deux, to the tight closeups of Amelia in Edouard Lock's choreography, raise the artistry of these pieces.

What is art anyway?

Just in case you weren't sure:

 
  
Art may be very difficult to define, because to define something is to take an objective view and to arrive at a description that many, if not necessarily all, can agree on.  But by nature, art is subjective, and because it is so varied and people are arguably each unique, it defies conventional definition.

That subjectivity, uniqueness and defiance are all why I love art.