Aristotle wrote: “Experience produces art, but inexperience only luck. Art is produced when out of many ideas gained through experience we draw one general conclusion about some class of like cases.”
Hmmm…
Now, Aristotle and I don’t always see eye to eye, but on the philosophy of art I tend to agree with him, at least this far.
I could suddenly start painting a series of paintings of Africa, but chances are the resulting pieces would lack inspiration and originality, since my only experience of Africa is second hand, a trickled-down compressed myopic view from someone else’s experience of that country. The quality would suffer because of the dearth of inspiration. It would be dead to me.
Art, in my opinion, needs subjectivity. In order to be art, it needs to provoke a response, however subtle, in the viewer. There is some art that I really don’t like. Take “The Scream”, by Edvard Munch for example. Not my favorite piece. But I have to concede that it is still art. Creepy? Yes. But still art.
Whenever I paint I try to remember this principle, and strive to let my work speak…
That’s all.
