After a night observing art that was of a more abstract nature, I reflected on what I saw and experienced and decided that one of the most interesting aspects of the night was listening to the conversations taking place. You have probably seen the paintings similar to the ones I was viewing and heard someone remark with a statement similar to "I think I could do that, it looks like splatter painting..." which I did hear, but I also heard other, more interesting conversations. Some of the people were walking around telling each other what they saw, others were describing an emotion, others were talking about how much they were worth or which one they would like in their home. Still some just sat and let the paintings sink in. some people knew the history of the artist and what made him important while others had never heard of him. All were there experiencing the art for different reasons and from different starting points.
Art is a funny thing it seems to me that it is often misunderstood and sometimes overly valued to a point of worship. But some where in the middle we see that artist gets things that we need to understand. C.S. Lewis when talking about his journey toward finding and understanding God uses the word Joy as describing a longing or a wonderment that draws us to something more, he describes the first time that he experienced this joy when looking at something his older brother had created. This longing or “Joy” is often captured by artists in different ways, using paint and canvas an artist has the ability to make observations of the world and push the viewer to rethink, to dream, or just to enjoy in a new way. The artist gets in some way what Lewis described as Joy.
