Describe this
How do you see this image? What do you think is going on?
The artist Cézanne spent a long time looking at an object in order to see it in a new way. It’s a way of slow knowing. The longer you maintain your concentration you see beyond the obvious. If you haven’t tried staring in the way Cézanne did (and everyone who learns to draw does), you may have repeated a word over and over until it becomes meaningless. Only then do you become more aware of the sound, or its rhythm.
Normally, we navigate the world by signs. We only need to identify an object in order to ascertain its danger quotient or usefulness. Then we move on. The scientific mind categorizes, judges, evaluates, analyzes, but the artistic mind sees.
I was walking on the beach with a physician friend of mine who has an interest in the inhabitants of tide pools. He was interested in identifying small crabs and nudibranchs. His scientific background led him to see the world in a certain way. I was trained as an artist. I had no interest in taxonomy. I was enjoying the colors and the shapes. Two of us were supposedly looking at the same thing, but what we saw was very different. How have you seen things differently?
