Since the pandemic began, I’ve had this impulse to look at, or hang on the walls of my home, new pieces of art. Sometimes, they’re pages from an old book or museum calendar; sometimes, a piece from a dealer or a work by someone I love. I take a walk every day, look at whatever seems beautiful, trees, roads, hills, brooks, buildings, animals, and people. And with art this sense of beauty can come inside with me.
And there’s something more. Something about aging, relationships, and life itself, or life in a time of great crisis, that eludes understanding yet is motivating this impulse.
I’ve written about art before. So have thousands of others. Art is one blessing we can all share. No matter how hard we look at, think, or feel about an artwork, it keeps on evoking something new⎼ or it can. One look, one realization sets the stage for the next.
There is an infinite depth to any perception, as any perception takes place in and is influenced by an infinite number of factors, or by the universe itself. It is this infinite depth that art can access. So the English poet William Blake, in his poem Auguries of Innocence, wrote the famous lines: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand. And a Heaven in a Wildflower.”
I look at this woodblock print by the Japanese artist Kawase Hasui which hangs on the wall of my bedroom. It is called The Inokashira Benten Shrine in Snow. I love this piece. It is so detailed. It depicts a snowstorm over an old Buddhist Shrine that sits next to a pond that over a hundred years ago stood at the head of the source of Edo’s (now Tokyo’s) drinking water. Each snowflake stands individually by itself, and then floats into the whole. I feel as if I could enter the scene, become another detail in it, or feel the artist as he painted it.
Maybe each artwork is a door to a hidden place in ourselves, or the universe, or the artist’s vision. Like C. S. Lewis’ wardrobe doorway to Narnia. Or a window; just like a painting might be framed, a window frames the world for us to view with care and attention. And I feel that if I can mount such windows and doors on my walls, I will never be lonely or bored. An adventure will always be available to me. One minute, the world might be tired or threatening. The next, it shines brightly.
Years ago, I bought a piece of Buddhist art, a slice of shale with a Buddha painted on it. It is a reproduction of a painting from a cave in Southeast Asia. When I slow down and let my eyes linger on it alone, focusing on the whole piece; then a detail; then back again, the scene expands, taking on dimensionality. I feel what I see. The Buddha stands there for a moment in 3-d.
Art was probably created just for this sort of purpose. When we let go of our focus on ourselves for a moment, our plans, concerns, and beliefs, art can help us see the world in more dimensions. That’s why, throughout the centuries, it was closely tied to religion and spirit. One of the greatest visual works of art ever was The Creation of Man (Human) painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, by Michelangelo.
Much of the earliest representational art was probably cave art. The art on one cave wall in Indonesia is 45,000 years old, although there are carvings going back even earlier. In France and Spain, the wall art goes back almost 40,000 years. Even the U. S. has cave art, although it’s not as old as that in Europe and elsewhere.
Our ancestors probably didn’t paint these walls just for decoration. Their work required great effort and resources so there must’ve been deep purpose behind it. They didn’t live in these caves or in any human-built structures. Some caves were extremely difficult and dangerous to access. To enter, they had to crawl through long, narrow tunnels. To paint the walls, they had to build scaffolds to get up high enough and create lights to see in the dark.
Anthropologists called the cave in Lascaux, southern France, “the Prehistoric Sistine Chapel” since the art was so magnificent, extensive, and seemingly sacred. It was centered on the animals and sometimes plants ancient humans saw around them and were tied to, and occasionally depicted humans and animals together in one body. Theories about why the art was created speculate it was a sort of hunting magic or it was born out of shamanistic journeys, or to record or help others embark on a spiritual ritual.
A painting of the Giant Deer from Lascaux. HTO, Public Domain
When I was teaching, students asked these same questions about why so much art was produced, or why any art was created. In my book on Compassionate Critical Thinking: How mindfulness, Creativity, Empathy, and Socratic Questioning Can Transform Teaching, I described how we explored these questions not just by researching what is known about the caves, but by empathetically placing ourselves as much as we could in the world of ancient humans.
Students decided to research in groups various aspects of the cave painter’s lives: their food, religion, tools, the other species they lived with, and the possible origins of language.
A group of five or six studied the paintings in detail and then reproduced the art on the walls of a rarely used stairwell of the school. This was before the pandemic, social distancing, and when teachers still had a planning period. One day, after the work was complete, this group asked the class to line up. And one by one we entered the stairwell. It felt like a cave. The only sound was the music of a flute. The only light source was a series of small lanterns placed near the painted walls. When we had all entered and sat down on the floor, I led the students in a visualization of what being in the caves might have been like. Then the student-artists discussed the paintings.
We created the activity together. I bet most still remember the experience. It enabled the class to feel engaged and develop a more in-depth perspective. They could then analyze evidence, evaluate theories, and derive their own conclusions.
Art educates all of us, not just children, about our shared humanity with everyone, not only today but back thousands of years. Art, not just framed paintings but street murals, and so much more can lift us out of our shells, our sense of isolation⎼ something so important right now. And help us feel humans throughout time trying to do what we do, trying to understand our world. Just as we try to understand how we can imagine or see things in our mind⎼ not only in dreams but as we read or hear someone speak⎼ so have other people throughout time done the same.
Can we feel in any art a connection to thousands of years of continuous human history? Or a way of understanding how what we see inside ourselves relates to what exists outside? Can we create with art a path to a spiritual journey, or a door to Narnia or to the individual artist embedded their time, culture, and world? Can a work of art help us bring everything we are, everything and everyone we’ve known, and every place we’ve ever been, to right here and now? Or as Blake said it, can we “Hold Infinity in the palm of [y]our hand” or bring eternity to an hour?”
Art is one way we teach ourselves to face our life, our fears and loves, aging, and death⎼ alone yet in the embrace of everything.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock