Shining Rain

Shining Rain

"Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them."  David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political, 1742

“A human body is present when, between the see-er and the visible, between touching and touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand a kind of crossover occurs, when the spark of the sensing/sensible is lit, when the fire starts to burn that will not cease until some accident befalls the body, undoing what no accident would have sufficed to do…”   “Eye and Mind”, Merleau-Ponty

I have come to understand that there is central dispute among art historians and critics about who actually creates a work of art. The question being this, is it the artist or the viewer. I must ask….. “Why so serious?”  Heath Ledger as the Joker, The Dark Knight, 2008

In fact we must surely say it is the interaction of the three factors involved which is the creation of art.

“In this tranquil space a viewer approaches the icons. She kneels before the alter. Immersed in this environment, surrounded by light, she is not alone. They are not two together but three as one. These three are artist, image, and viewer. The strength of this iconic gesture is almost overwhelming. The scent of this creation fills her being. All the rest fades away. All that remains is the image and the space enfolding them. In this moment its need becomes her need. She feels the beat of its heart and the strength of its life as her eyes embrace it, and through her eyes her soul. It is that mysterious primitive part which is unlike her, and yet completes her. She yearns for this which is not part of her to become her, like shining rain in a thunderstorm light spills and falls from one onto the other. Viewer, image, and maker are as one. For this brief time together they transcend the ordinary and enter the sublime. The world around is lost to her in those bright moments of pure bliss. Her deep overwhelming need finds its satisfaction. Her ecstasy uncoils from a hidden core. Starting deep within it blossoms like the warmest memory of all past forbidden pleasures. St Theresa understood this. This is what great art can achieve. And this achievement is done in concert. Without any of the three the one cannot flower. And it is in this flowering that the true intrinsic, unknowable, and unspeakable, beauty of the human situation is apparent.”   “The Menil Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum, an Essay in Aesthetics” Joe Battle, 2009

White Light and the Color Spectrum

“In regards color we might all understand that we are all together reaching for a definition of something that's basically indefinable. But that the reaching itself is the essence of a definition of being human. The word essence is not a broad term but a specific term. So if I say, “the essence of being human”, it is a specific laser light shining on a true intrinsic meaning. if we look at it in that way the meaning of it is really the search and the struggle to find a definition of how we interpret color. Physical sensations, like the light entering our eyes, or the taste of food we will attempt to interpret into deeper meaning. Dogs see in black and white, while honeybees sense the movement of quantum particles. We are in fact human. It is our nature to define what that means, how we look at the universe, how we interpret the universe. Otherwise, we are just living, getting and experiencing the light, unreflective, like an animal.”
                                                        Joe Battle at café Brazil, 2-2010