carnation, lily

I never used to like art all that much. Maybe that’s a weird thing to say. It’s not that I’ve actively disliked it, it’s just that I didn’t particularly care for it. I’d walk through galleries and not really feel the connection I knew I was supposed to feel, the joy of looking at something and the joy of recognizing what it means, to oneself, individually, and the happiness that comes with that – with finding your own thoughts, rearranged into words of a book, or colours on a painting, or notes of a song, by someone else.

I think that’s the main point of art, or what we define as “good art”. Art can never really be bad or good, all it can do is reflect something back to us, something that was always there, never quite ready to be caught by our own thoughts but wonderfully captured by someone else, and so that creator has explained a piece of ourselves to us, by doing the transitioning from thought to actual piece for us to look at and finally understand. That’s what happens to me when I read a good book; these moments where I have to pause for a brief moment and look up from the pages and savour the sentence I just read. Because it’s a truth that has always been hidden somewhere deep inside of the windings of my brain but I never quite knew how to give form to it and then I find someone who did just that, and did it so well that I have to jump up to go get my pen and copy that particular sentence into my notebook.

The point of all this is; I never used to care for galleries all that much because the paintings didn’t speak to me. Up until one day some time ago when I visited the Tate Britain museum in London and walked through room after room when I happened upon a rectangular hall. It was filled with paintings of all different sizes and colours but I was immediately drawn to one painting in particular, like a moth to a light bulb. It was a beautiful depiction of two girls, standing in the middle of tall grass on a clear summer’s eve, both of them dressed in white gowns, holding glowing lampions in their hands. The light that emanated from these lampions illuminated their fine faces, shone through the whole picture and gave it something magical that tugged at my heartstrings. I could have just stood there and looked at it for hours (I did walk all the way back to it once I came to the exit because I couldn’t leave without having seen it a second time).

The painting is called “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” and I still haven’t quite worked out yet what it is about it, or what it means to me exactly that it makes me want to weep every time I look at it but I just ordered a 100×75 cm fine art print to hang up above my bed so I’m sure I’ll be able to work it out somehow.