What Does Art Mean To Me?

What Does Art Mean to Me and Why Is Art Important?

My art level 5 group at Kinsale Campus attended an open studio. The artist was Michael Quane, who is widely known, but as I was just beginning my journey into the art world as a student, he was unknown to me.

Michael answered a question about how he approaches a piece of unworked virgin stone, or a blank canvas. He explained the phenomena of pareidolia, which means seeing recognisable objects, symbols and shapes in unrelated patterns that may appear in things like clouds, indentations on a wall, or random patterns on a piece of paper or wood. This grabbed my attention, as I have always been a pareidolia addict. Since childhood I have seen faces, objects, animals and meanings in random phenomena around me. Today for example a beautiful running horse appeared in the clouds in Connemara in the west of Ireland while I waited for a bus on my journey back to Kinsale. It lifted my spirits as pareidolia always seems to. It’s more though, than seemingly random patterns in nature and the objects around me; it’s patterns in thought, patterns in word and patterns in deed. These patterns flow into illustrations and symbols that have profound meaning to me personally.

I am a lifelong musician and sounds take on a personal significance to me. On the journey of passing through my senses, they transmute into the sounds I’m used to hearing from instruments and voices. These form patterns that make musical sense. As a novice visual artist, I am making sense out of scenes and information that exist for me within my subject in a similar way. As with pareidolia, art is in the eye or the ear, the mind and all the relevant senses of the artist. The “delivery” of the piece through the artist, and out into the world allows art to be shared by others.

Rituals such as theatre, art exhibitions and live concerts, are presented or performed to enable us to perceive and experience art and enjoy doing so by exercising our personal freedom of choice in our own individual way.

To me art is freedom. With art we have opportunity to allow in ourselves and in each other, opinions, emotions, and a shared experience. For example, we can visit an art exhibition or an open studio event with a friend and feel uplifted by the sharing of the event, or the discussion that follows. Attending alone with an open and receptive mind can be a learning experience or an expansion or our cultural awareness. We can create a piece of art as a personal experience or through a longing to share our perspective with others. These human responses are generally allowed, expected and encouraged in the arts.

Art helps us get to know one another as human beings through interaction, observation, and discussion. We can allow ourselves to share a part of ourselves that we cannot so easily share through less individual forms of expression. Through our involvement with the arts, we can make beautiful and natural choices. The more of these choices we learn to give to ourselves the more freedom we can experience and the more value we can create around us. Thereby improving and recreating our groups and families and society in general.

I went to Kinsale Campus to study art because I love the arts and I’ve always lived as an artist. I have studied and practised performance as a professional performer and teacher and through music, as a singer, instrumentalist and composer, also through theatre film and tv as an actor. More recently I have created a musical theatre piece. I have not studied visual art. I have always longed to give this subject my full attention and develop the skills needed to be able to express myself as a visual artist as well.

I’m happy to say I recently sold my first picture, which is a landscape called “Over The Forset” acrylic collage.