Art does wonderful and strange things to the brain. One of my main goals as an artist is to demonstrate and inflict certain emotions on a viewer. Art can do that. One of these strange things that most living creatures do is create a facade that tricks our brains. I think it's by mistake that we are skeptical beings. We would probably take everything at face value and be gullible in nature if we weren't constantly being deceived- if not by those around us then often by our own senses. But, where an artist succeeds and a butterfly's wings often fail is that when we see a face in art we can have our brains momentarily tricked. Ah, who am I kidding? Sometimes a butterfly's wings can do the exact same thing.
(Butterfly picture borrowed from this Biome Detectives of Costa Rica blog) ("Lady with an Ermine" by Leonardo Da Vinci borrowed from Art Times)
One of the great things about art is how deep it can get. Sometimes even unintentionally. When you look at something like "Lady with an Ermine" pictured above what you're looking at is crud smeared on a canvas. All sorts of crud smeared on a canvas of varying compositions in such a way that when light reflects off of it the photoreceptors in our eyes perceive it similarly to how we would perceive light reflecting off of a person.
Some people just stop at that. It's good enough that we, as humans, have mastered the technology of smearing crud on canvas until it tricks our eyes into thinking we're looking at a person rather than a crud-smeared canvas. We're already bordering on witchcraft as it is, why go deeper right?
Well, for many people with artistically tuned brains it's going to go much deeper than that. The expression on her face. The direction of the lighting. The colors used. The positioning of her fingers. The "flow" of the painting. Everything about it.
When you look at something in real life it is constantly moving, changing, and contains infinite details going down to a microscopic level that has never been discovered by human kind and is constantly affected by forces grander and more plentiful than can have been fully contextualized. But when you look at a painting of a person holding a weasel and looking off to the right of the border of the painting you are seeing two life forms contained within an entire universe where everything that affects them is standing still and everything that matters is either being observed directly or through context clues. An entire world is happening before you and it's on pause for you to take in and understand. And most importantly, it allows you to draw your own conclusions.
That's mainly what I was building up to. See, many artistically minded people are plagued with this horrible rattling in the head that's called imagination. Imagination can make your head feel uncomfortably crowded and chaotic. What good art can do, however, is turn the mess of potential in your imagination into a well-orchestrated story.
Art plants these seeds in your head and your head is a wonderfully fertile place for these seeds to grow. A character can live a whole life in your head in very little time. Your mind is much bigger on the inside than you realize. It's also much more fertile than you think, because some of the most simple seeds can blossom into extravagant images packed with intense emotions and implied stories.
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Clearly it doesn't take an awful lot to set our brains off. On a side note, the sky in Munch's "The Scream" looks like bacon to me. I could turn that into a statement about imagination and art interpretation but I'm pretty sure that that's just an example of me being sick in the head.
Anyway, what is wonderful to me about this is that it makes art a sort of an egg. Or, perhaps art is a sperm and your mind is an egg. The sheer manipulative force that it has on the brain is astounding.
Some people decide to use these manipulative forces to their benefit. Advertisements and public relations agencies pour millions of dollars into ensuring that the art that they put up on the billboards in your town plant the right seed in your brain to play a story about how awesome their products are. This story is playing in your mind and you're (more than likely) not actively trying to induce this fantasy. Having images "subliminally" play stories in your mind can make it hard to discern them from your own urges and wants and dreams when they're something that sounds appealing to you. Like taking a bite of a juicy cheeseburger and imagining all of the tastes and textures and smells associated with every savory chew of the tender meat, light bread, savory cheese and fresh onions and pickles. For example, I mean.
These advertisement agencies know exactly what colors to use, what shapes, what placement of images in the overall composition, what angle to show the products from, what font and color the text should be in, exactly how succinct the text should be, whether or not it would benefit the product to address the costumer directly by saying, "You" or if it would better serve the product to use bandwagon words like, "Everybody." Just about every aspect of this kind of art is planned to put a fantasy in your head about eating sandwiches. They bring everything together with, "Oh, and by the way, here's where you can buy said sandwiches!"
That's part of why advertisements are so simple. They are only trying to tell one major story: their product is amazing and you should love it and make it a part of your life. They don't often leave many open ends.
The art that more interests me is the one that leaves millions of open ends. See, while advertisements try to bring every aspect of their art toward one goal of promoting their product, the artists that I enjoy the most accomplish much more than their normal point. They plant a seed in your mind that mutates and gnarls and grows in many directions because there is just so much to it.
The triptych painting above by Dutch renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch has lost its original title but people call it, "The Garden of Earthly Delights". It is my single favorite piece of art ever made. It displays a single story over the entire work. This is then separated into four different segments. I know what you're thinking though: John don't be silly. This is a TRIPTYCH. It is clearly separated into three segments!
Well, that's where you'd be wrong. That is the painting in its OPEN position. It actually closes to reveal one last segment:
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Bam. This piece of art has more going on in it than a "Where's Waldo?" book does but every piece of it tells more stories. Every tiny detail carries character, conflict, and details of its own.
Where most art plants a seed in your mind that will grow into a tree bearing many fruits, Bosch's painting plants enough seeds to grow an entire orchard.
This crowded many-concepts-in-one technique is one that I've tried often in my own art and I think it's pretty apparent.
Bosch is a huge inspiration to my work. To me, having many pieces of art inside of one, larger piece of art gives the piece of art a longer life and thus makes my more crowded pieces more valuable to myself, personally. It's especially gratifying when I can go back to my own work and see things that I don't even remember putting there myself.
On to the final segment of this post, I want to talk about video games. I'm not going to start a debate here about whether or not video games are art (that's for a different post altogether) but for the sake of the rest of this post let's assume that video games are indeed art and that I can make my point about them without anybody feeling the urge to debate. After the post is over you can go back to believing whatever you want.
When people started making movies suddenly visual art had an extra dimension. The temporal dimension of time passing in an image lends itself to creating stories that actually unfold before a viewer. Before if an artist wanted to accomplish this they would have to make their visual art an illustration of a written story or poem. The only other way would be to make multiple panels of different points in time, such as in a comic or a triptych like Bosch's masterpiece I discussed earlier. Now, however, the different panels are able to switch in succession so fast that they give the illusion of movement. Then, with time, sound was added to create an entire extra dimension of story telling, art, and mood setting.
With the creation of video games we initially had very basic artistic representations of objects mixed with amazing interactivity.
Interactivity changed everything. It bends the time in the narrative. It allows you to look off the side of the canvas into the surrounding areas that you couldn't previously see. You didn't just get the context that was given to you rigidly with the narrative. You controlled the pace and direction of the narrative. In just about any game you play there are at least three possible branches the story can go down: the protagonist wins, the protagonist loses before the end of the quest, and the story ends abruptly with an uncertain future (should the game be aborted before the end so the player can go eat a sandwich).
Games have since been improved to have amazing pieces of visual and audio art by their own merits that put flesh and body to the world and characters a game world is made of. This makes the appeal of games as art very similar to the appeal of something like Bosch's painting (at least to me).
One in particular that I wanted to note is an independent game out of Japan by developer Kikiyama called Yume Nikki. Most people interested in dark, surreal PC games already know plenty about Yume Nikki, but I'll give it a brief description for those who aren't aware: You play as a girl named Madotsuki who travels around in her dark and vaguely off-putting dreams. There's no real combat to speak of and aside from a quest to collect a number of "effects" that give Madotsuki special abilities that can unlock an ending to the game there isn't much of a goal. Most people opt to simply wander about the dreamscape interacting with the bizarre denizens and discovering secret areas.
What I really dig about Yume Nikki is that, aside from every part of the game being filled with superb visual art, the game lays down an incredibly interesting universe inside of this girl's head with no context or explanation of who this girl is or why she has these thoughts. All that we know about her is what she sees in her dreams and that she won't leave her apartment. Aside from that we are left in the dark.
This vagueness that the game has left us with combined with the extremely interesting imagery and content has sparked peoples' imaginations all over. A quick image search of "Yume Nikki" on Google will give tons of examples of well executed fan art. Fans of Yume Nikki have created their own spin-off games starring new characters dealing with their own messed up dreams in a similar fashion to Yume Nikki. My favorite part, however, is how many people have tried to fill in the game's blanks with their own theories based on psychological evaluations of Madotsuki's dreams. Seriously, people get really into guessing what the Hell this game is actually about. Careful reading that stuff though. It gets REALLY dark.
Anyway, that's kind of the note I want to leave this post off on. I just wanted to rant and ramble a bit on how art can take your mind for some totally wild rides. If you wanted to play that Yume Nikki game, you can download it by clicking here. It's free and that's the English translated version. Just be ready for a really unsettling romp through a nightmare world.
Much love and mind seeds,
William John Holly III
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