Art Show Reflection 2

Yesterday I went to see Bonnie Veblen's SMP presentation on her artwork.  First of all, I was deeply impressed with the artwork itself, which I got to look at for a few minutes before her presentation began.  The depth of the detail, maybe not necessarily accurate to the scene itself, but to the painting, and what she was trying to augment was very impressive.  I definitely connected with her when she was talking about how art, for her, is about trying to experience the world anew, to reexamine the beauty that is present all around us, especially in the seemingly mundane or everyday things that we no longer notice.  When she mentioned how children have no problem doing this, and that we are too busy to any longer take notice of these exquisite wonders, it struck me that also, maybe it was because, for the children, these things were not yet mundane, everyday things, that they had not been here long enough to be able to forget to appreciate them.  I also really identified with her answer to one of the questions, which, if I remember correctly, had to do with her mentioning the privateness of the vision that is then manifested on her canvas, and how she reconciles that privateness with sharing it with the rest of the world as a work of art.  She said that she is not trying to keep this vision of hers to herself, but wants other people to understand and appreciate it.  I think this is one of the main reasons and characteristics of art, much less the human experience.  It reminded me of a scene from "Into the Wild", where the hermetic youth is dying of poisonous berries, and jots the note "happiness is real only when shared" in the space between paragraphs of the book he is reading.