What’s around you? Do you take pleasure in a bank of wildflowers along the interstate? Or are you just simply, mindlessly driving by?
Throughout my career I have wondrously noticed how visual artists have a way of “seeing” that the rest of us don’t possess. How is it that they can really notice that that one bank of trees is set further back? How is it that they see that particular shade of pink? How is it that they can take nature and break it into totally abstracted form?
As the brilliant abstract landscape painter Wolf Kahn once said, “I don’t have to make a tree look just like a tree; everybody knows what a tree looks like.”
As we look at and study works of art, let them teach you how to see and how to look, how to know that color can be arbitrary, that scale does not have to be accurate. People don’t have to look just like themselves. After all, never forget that all art is fiction. u
Jerald Melberg is the president and director of Jerald Melberg Gallery, which he founded in 1983. Representing living artists and important estates, the gallery is located at 625 South Sharon Amity Road. Visit www.jeraldmelberg.com to find out more, or call 704-365-3000. The gallery is open Monday - Saturday 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.