Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Transcending the Barriers to Communication Through the Arts

Stephanie Steele is a Nova Scotia artist and friend of mine who works in a number of different mediums, creating a wide variety of compelling and intriguing works of art.


I've always believed that in artistic expression we have the unparalleled potential to transcend the barriers to true communication that language and culture impose on us. In essense, it liberates us from the confines of the "here and now", and allow us to imagine, and to feel. It's a shared experience, which transcends the temporal boundaries of our linear existence. The artist creates a work; we then create our own interpretation, and by doing so, become artists ourselves. That the artist may be long dead is irrelevant; we can still communicate through the work.

Here's another example of Stephanie's work that I really like, and that "speaks" to me as a disciple of Kerouac and Bukowski and the rest of the "Beats"...


As always with art, what it says to me might not be the same thing as what it says to you, because the conversation that art and music inspires in people is the most important one of all - the conversation that we have with ourselves. This is why I consider art, in all its myriad forms, to be the highest of callings in a world desperately in need of real communication, and a new Enlightenment.

Paul Kimball

2 comments:

Greg said...

If the artist is good, he or she makes intuitives of us all.

Paul Kimball said...

Exactly! I view them in much the same way as people uded to view mystics, and spiritual leaders - not as the final word, but as a doorway or conduit through which communication might flow, and then the person listening (or in the case of art, looking), could make up their own mind, and find their own intepretation.

As opposed to that guy... what's his name... oh yeah, the Pope. You know, where it's his way or the highway.

Sadly, there are many artists who work the same way. They usually become critics. ;-)

PK