Sounds heavy, eh? Let's make it not. Wanna keep this light here. As a person with artistic leanings, not quite an 'artist' (I haven't labeled myself as such) I have been on the lookout for the next picture. I thought it would be a portrait.
Yeah. A portrait of a striking face, a startling face. Maybe the face of a celebrity, but that would be soooo done already and indeed, in doing searches online, I saw that such was true. There are untold numbers of artists who have drawn, painted, or even sculpted the likenesses of celebrities the way musicians endlessly cover popular songs.
So I couldn't go there. Perhaps online or even in the neighborhood there were art worthy subjects but..... .....celebrities usually aren't physically flawed like normal people are and the people I saw online or on the street were mainly (no offense, nothing personal) not worth the effort.
What I did see, though, was that I was actually searching for the representation of a quality (or qualities) of energy. Name a few examples? How about confidence? Bearing? Attitude? Sadness? Weariness? Wisdom? On and on that list could go.
Then, through doing that, I saw that people's faces held, and their bodies housed, only temporary representations of something that can’t be seen. I was searching for something to draw that can't ever be drawn. It can only be alluded to.
Superman of centuries ago?
Andreas Nextvoyagepl- Unsplash.com
This was sobering. Energy refuses to be captured and any picture that we see is just some artist's interpretation of energy that he or she has offered up to the masses to consume. (Writing is the same way, it is the assemblage of words that point to things beyond words).
This is why there are no pictures of God and never will be. The formless can take a form pleasing to the eye or something that scares the pants off of you because the formless can shape itself into all forms. It's only our interpretation of what we see that makes the difference because to some thing, some being, that has no form what difference does taking on one form or another make? To them it's only another costume, another set of clothes.
Associations I've made with people I have known who have passed on, whose forms no longer exist, cause me to almost automatically link the energetic qualities they had to present time people possessing similar physical traits. Anybody having something close to old Uncle Harry's big bushy eyebrows, thick black hair, and big fleshy hands suggests to me that they are gluttonous and rather fun, while people having Aunt Edna's wide mouth, hawkish nose, and rather narrow face give me an almost kneejerk reaction that they should be avoided if possible as they possess a haughty sense of refinement- and could employ cutting disdain. You know how it goes. It's hard to get the pictures of them, and the energies they represented to you, out of your mind.
Ditto famous people. Marilyn Monroe (voluptuousness, sexuality) has never changed in my view, Abe Lincoln (morality, virtue) always looks the same way to me, and Winston Churchill (indignation, resolve) scowls forever in my consciousness.
Taking this line of thought further, what about pictures (other than actual photographs) of 'spiritual people'? The saint, shaman, healer, earth mother, religious warrior, world savior? There are webpages galore of them to peruse. Many of them are beautifully drawn but none of them are real. Or you could just skip all that and hurry over to the DC comics universe, an even better example of what I'm talking about. Superman! The very picture of pure selfless nobility. Wonder Woman! Physical representation of amazon warrior protector energy. Batman! Clever, witty guardian angel of Everyman, and his nemeses The Joker, The Riddler, Mr. Freeze, The Penguin, etc., evil minded criminal elements able to be tripped up due to the blind spots contained in their wacky schemes. All representations of that which we cannot see.
It's getting so bad that no matter what I'm looking at I'm seeing it for what it is- only a caricature. I've got to say, this being a budding artist has been unexpectedly traumatic!
I see the formless hiding within everything now.