In Joan M. Erikson's book, Wisdom and the Senses, Leo Garel, a painter, speaks about what art means to him.
"Painting is full of paradoxes. Your style is made up of your limitations and your strengths. You must preserve the flatness of the surface, yet you must deal with the illusion of space. Symmetry and ugliness. Movement and balance. Line and mass. Simplicity and complexity. The color should maintain the quality of the paint, but it should also be atmosphere. Though it is possible to speak of these all as separate elements, in painting they all must be unified into one inseparable force."
"You have hydrogen and oxygen, but you don't have water until they are combined in an exact way and then there is an exciting, new, indispensable element. What combines all the separate and contradictory forces that go into a painting and make it an exciting new element? Simple feeling. Our feelings are magically able to compress all the complexities of our experiences into an elegant unity that becomes a direct statement, a painting."
"Salt is made up of sodium, a corrosive substance that eats metal, and chloride, a deadly gas. Combined together they make salt, which is so useful and adds so much flavor for all mankind. Painting is like that. It is made up of the sorrows and chaos of people, but transforms them into order and beauty."
I think life is like that. Combining the tragedies of our lives in such a way, that we have something useful and flavorful for all mankind. Today, I celebrate the union of hydrogen and oxygen, and sodium and chloride. Without them, we would not be here.
Kitties are bouncing all over the house. The calm air is trying to understand what happened, and is building little cushions within itself to sit and compare.
Hmmm! The air considers, decides movement is rest, and settles back into the rhythm of a rocking chair.