A Leaf on a Tree

The Eye, The Hand and The Materials (no.1) - Aesthetics and Resonance

Kaleidoscopics no.266 - 2021

A couple of weeks ago I posted the article Typographic Abstraction and in the comments Ester Feske wrote the following.

Esther Feske Jul 22

“I love this essay on your process. I can relate to much of it but you are more disciplined than I am! I have been attracted to your collages since finding them several years ago. It's your "eye," your aesthetic which resonates. So satisfying. But I have the feeling that one's method does not shape one's aesthetic. Fine-tunes it, yes. Yet there are so few artists who truly resonate with my own heart/ eye that I think the "eye" is in a different realm.

Perhaps you've addressed this mystery in another essay, I haven't read them all! And I'm interested in your thoughts on that.

Thanks again for consistently satisfying my eye, my artist soul.”

So I am going to try to address this subject…

This is a question of the eye (one’s sense of aesthetic), the hand (the mechanics of construction and composition) and the encounter with the materials.

Taken together, this forms a complex intersection of influences that result in a work of art, in this case collage art. It is probably a more complex issue with collage or found materials than working in many other more homogeneous media. But who knows….

I’ll stick to collage as the basis of the ideas I will explore here.

The most mysterious element in this discussion will be the sense of aesthetic I would think. I do have thoughts on this subject. But let’s take Esther’s main term: ‘resonate’ and hence resonance. When it comes to something resonating with people this typically means

‘to evoke a feeling of shared emotion or recognition’,

‘to produce or evoke an appealing feeling of familiarity’,

“relate harmoniously : strike a chord”,

“when something resonates with you, it is vibrating at the same frequency as you metaphorically. This means that there is a harmony between you and the thing that resonates with you.”

Hence, when a viewer looks at a work of art and it resonates with them it does not mean that the artwork itself is doing anything other than being itself. Any work of art will resonate with some people and not with everyone else. So all of us who are involved in art and art making and art viewing are, according to our own nature, going to have a resonance with certain works of art and the work of certain artists with whom we have a sympathetic nature: “an understanding between people; common feeling.”

That is a complex thing in itself when you think about it. It means the artist and the viewer have some kind of shared experience and in terms of art objects that might mean a shared experience and understanding of history, in this case, cultural history as well as a certain sense of aesthetic and beauty cultivated by that history. We might not be able to intellectually identify the elements of this shared experience that gives us a feeling of resonance but inwardly, perhaps emotionally, there is this recognition of something held in common, some poetic understanding and attraction.

Each one of us absorbs the world around us in our own unique way through what attracts or repulses us, through where we place our attention and what we ignore. Through these filters we can only take in and assimilate so much and almost everything else is outside of our circle of familiarity. Some people are more adventurous that others in terms of what they can take in and people interested in the arts tend to be inclined to be among the more adventurous type and because of it have a richer and more subtle ability therefore, to respond to the world around them. Everything we do as artists encourages this wider lens.

At the same time there is the continual ‘migration of aesthetic interest’ individually and culturally as I like to think about it. This is to say that, as we go along, the things that interest us or give us a feeling of aesthetic pleasure is, to some degree, in constant flux.

This can sometimes be explained by our ongoing growth in the development of our aesthetic sensibility. At the beginning we might be attracted to certain things but over time, these things can lose their attraction for us as our ‘taste’ becomes more subtle and more refined and as we become more knowledgeable.

Depending on where or how you live or what culture you are living in or what kind of landscape surrounds you, these things will have an effect on your aesthetic sensibility. Hopefully the further you go along your trail, the more everything becomes interesting and has a beauty about it.

Hence another thing Esther said

It's your "eye," your aesthetic which resonates. So satisfying. But I have the feeling that one's method does not shape one's aesthetic. Fine-tunes it, yes. Yet there are so few artists who truly resonate with my own heart/ eye that I think the "eye" is in a different realm.

To have a ‘Good Eye’ ‘is a special ability to notice or recognize a particular thing or quality.’

But it might not just be the eye, although I do think I have a pretty good eye, I think there are also a few other things at play and one of them might be ‘intention’. Every work of art starts with some intention or aim or purpose. But to arrive at that aim or purpose is based on a very complex network of knowledge, insights and decision making over time.

I would also add the element of arriving at a permission structure - what will you permit yourself to do? These are some of the things I am always thinking about. A lot of artists will only permit themselves to do certain things. In general I do try to ‘stay in my lane’ so to speak, to follow and explore my motifs; language, poetics, musicality, abstraction, chance based aesthetics, etc. but part of my interest is to always be exploring my own sense of boundary. If I get too far afield, outside of my overall aim and purpose then it gives me a feeling of being off track on an intuitive level. I try to always align myself with my own intuition.

Another theory I have is that if you can operate from your own intuitive depth, the closer to your center you can get, the more you touch the center of everyone. This kind of gets into my own spiritual thinking and training and experiences.

My basic thought is that at our depth of being we are all the same being. We are all like a leaf on a great tree. When we explore our intuitive depth we first go down into our stem then into the twig we are a part of, then into to the branch, then into the limb the branch is attached to and eventually into the trunk and roots of the tree. If your intuition can get that far then whatever you do has some effect on all leaves across the whole tree.

So, as an artist, if your intuitive knowingness can get all the way into the depths of the tree trunk, then the tree itself is expressing itself through you and that can have a deep resonance with all of us individual selves who are the leaves on that tree. That is my own poetic way of looking at things. So in practice I am trying, as an artist, to let the tree express itself through me, the little individual, fragile, temporary leaf blowing in the wind and here only for a short season. In the end there is only the tree.

I didn’t really get to the other two elements of the ‘hand’ and ‘the materials’ but I will continue to think about those elements and how they might play into the mix.

So there is a little stab Esther at exploring your very kind comment.

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What resonates with you in a work of art?

What do you think it is that causes that resonance?

Has your sense of aesthetic migrated over time?

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