Living Life
through the Canvas: Art from the Perspective of a Young Mind
by Daniel Lupo
My fascination with
art began only two years ago, when I was a sophomore in high
school. It hit me suddenly and abruptly, as if it was an
epiphany. Like all idealistic and daydreaming adolescents,
I've had an incalculable amount of epiphanies throughout my high school
years. I've gone through the old standbys (such as being a
rock star and/or a Hollywood A-lister) as well as some that are not so
common (like a brilliant mathematician or the next poet
laureate). But all of those were just fleeting fantasies that
came into my head with a bang, overworked themselves to the point of
exhaustion, and then made room for the next one. I used to
sit in the back of my parents' car and listen to music while staring
out the window, inventing grandiose situations that revolved around
these aspirations and reveling in them while my CD player provided the
background music. So when the visions of artistic prolificacy
started appearing, I naturally thought that they would just fade away
in about a week or two. I immediately grabbed my CD player
and started daydreaming, fearing that if I didn't start right then and
there, they might have given in to something else before I had time to
contemplate them.
But to my surprise,
they never gave in. For the first time in my life, I had a
vital and durable passion for something. This wasn't just
some recycable delusion of grandeur that I could fall back on whenever
I needed to feel better about myself, like the others were.
In a single sweep, art had taken over my brain. It became an
obsession--I lived it, dreamed it, ate it, breathed it. I
started doodling more than I ever had before. Black ink
attacked the pages of my school notebooks, swirling in vibrant,
abstract patterns around information about symbolism in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and
instructions on how to graph a cubic function. I even viewed
nature differently. If I stared at a tree, for example, I
would start to see brushstrokes in the bark and observe how the sun
cast a shadow on each and every leaf while speculating about how I
would paint it on a canvas. Now when I listened to my music,
I only thought about being an artist. I dreamed about
exhibiting my work in a gallery, having a huge art opening in New York,
never knowing what it's like to have a bad review, changing the course
of art history....
And then I would come
back down to my harsh reality. The truth was that I really
did not know how to draw or paint very well at all. Sure, I
was better than the average fifteen-year-old, but not as good as I
hoped I could be. So then why did I yearn to be an
artist? What could have enticed someone with mediocre
artistic ability to obsess over art? I was a better piano
player than I was an artist--why didn't I aspire to be the next
Gershwin instead of the next Warhol? It took me awhile to
find the answers to these questions which had plagued my mind for so
long. But I finally came to realize, after months of
pondering, that the truth lay deep inside the painting.
*
* *
My mouth was agape, in
response to the mixture of shock, terror, agony, despair, anger,
frustration, restlessness that was spiraling around and around in my
mind. Random, vibrant interjections of orange, blue, green,
beige, black, red, yellow, brown, gold swirled around me in confusion
as the black figures passed by me with stoic indifference.
The pier on which I was standing seemed to collapse underneath me,
while its own hodgepodge of hues mingled with the others. In
a desperate search for stability, I pressed my hands against the sides
of my face, as if holding my mind back from insanity. I could
feel my rotten peach-colored skin sinking into the vortex behind me as
my eyes popped out of my head. Soon, my body would be
vacuumed into nothingness while my diseased psyche would be left
stranded and disconnected from society without any hope of
salvation. Then I moved my eyes upward and I saw a white
wall, which immediately washed away all of the torturous feelings and
blanketed my mind with serenity. And that was my experience
with Edvard Munch's painting The
Scream. There was my answer. The
reason that I wanted to be an artist so much, the reason that I was so
deeply fascinated by art, was because art is powerful enough to change
your emotions. In other forms of expression, such as writing
and music, the creator leaves the process of forming a mental image up
to the reader or the listener (a rather indirect way of getting a point
across). Only very gifted authors and musicians, those who
are successfully able to transmit abstract thoughts and ideas through
words or musical notes, can paint an image that is so clear and precise
that it is able to transform their audience's mood. But art
is able to do this all the time. An abstract painting with
dark colors that have been applied violently onto the canvas is enough
to make an otherwise cheerful observer a little grimmer. Even
a single stroke of black paint against a pristine white background can
evoke a pang of depression in the most observant viewer.
Regardless of the skill level of the artist who created it, a painting
is the most direct way to display a mood. In most cases,
whether the painting looks realistic or not, what is depicted on the
canvas is really the artist's photograph of the mind. Upon
close inspection of a work of art, the viewer becomes engulfed by it,
temporarily trapped within the borders of the frame, his or her
emotions manipulated at least somewhat by the picture.
>So in essence,
art makes me feel more powerful. Power was always something
that I never really had over people--I'm very quiet and reserved, often
overlooked by other people around me because I never say anything more
than a few words at a time. I don't really know what it's
like to stand up, take charge, be a leader, have people follow me and
do what I say. I'm to passive for that. Art lends
me the opportunity to at least momentarily bend people's thoughts and
pay attention to what I have to say. Now of course I don't
enjoy this simply because I want to have total control; it just makes
me feel more self-confident knowing that I can make an impression on
people, as long as they take a serious look at what I have to show them
in my artwork. I must admit, though, that I'm still not as
proficient in art as I would like to be. In fact, it's
probably going to take me a few years to get there. But
that's not going to hinder my art. I don't believe that
artistic perfection in a composition is a prerequisite to getting your
point across. Attitudes and emotions are able to transcend
the superficial and technical aspects of a painting because they are
what's most important (in my opinion, anyway). So even though
at this stage in my life I'm not the artist I am in my dreams, I'm
still able to inject my feelings into the canvas just as well.
As I mentioned
earlier, what truly gave me insight into why I suddenly became so
interested in art was looking at The
Scream. Indeed, I was attracted to art as an
observer before I decided to pursue making it myself. Many
teenagers who want to express their feelings (which can run from fury
to giddiness in the course of one day) choose to do so by writing them
down in a diary or as poetry. Others, like me, choose to do
so by drawing or painting. But I've found that a more passive
approach is just as effective as the former ones. Just
looking at a painting, drawing, photograph, or sculpture that reflects
my current mood helps me to identify with something and feel a little
less isolated. When experiencing a negative emotion, such as
anger or sadness, I find it therapeutic to find a piece of artwork that
best represents what I'm feeling, especially if it portrays that
emotion on human figures. That way, I can not only feel
empathetic toward the subject, but also channel my own feelings through
the work itself and make them come to life in front of my eyes, as if
I'm turning my mind inside out. Likewise, gazing at a jovial
or soothing piece of artwork can help me to cool down if I'm mad or
cheer up if I'm depressed. So taking time to sit back and
take a good look at a work of art is just as effective as making art at
channeling the wide range of emotions that adolescents run through at
least once on a daily basis.
The Spanish artist
Antoni Tàpies once said that "knowledge and love, the things
that the great men of wisdom preach, can be found only by the
individual, through introspection, which requires tremendous
effort....Art really can have an educative effect, but it's only a door
which leads, in turn, to a further door." I think that art,
whether created or observed, can lead to many doors in our souls,
behind each of which is a human emotion, attitude, or outlook on
life. For me, those doors are always open. The
ideas behind them are always ready to jump out and express themselves
in one way or another. Before I discovered my interest in
art, many of those doors were bolted shut. My shyness and
reticence refused to let the contents behind them reveal themselves,
leaving them stranded and forgotten in the darkness. But then
I decided to take a look inside of myself. I was expecting it
to be a dead end, a vast expanse of emotional blankness, like a room
with nothing in it except four colorless walls. Yet instead I
saw a whole art museum. Every centimeter of every wall of
every room was covered with paintings, photographs, sculptures,
lithographs, etchings, sketches, and installations that kept
multiplying and multiplying until the building was about to
burst. At that point I realized why I needed to start
creating art--I needed a bigger exhibition space for my
soul.
