Art Crit Bomb

 I’m almost sixty and have practiced the arts since drawing/painting as a child. For the past fifteen years I’ve maintained a studio/gallery in an arts district of a popular tourist destination and have interacted with people from around the world, and sold over a thousand original works, from pastel to water color to oil paint and everything in-between.

What humans want from art is to be temporarily arrested by something that is floating and glowing; no matter what it is—a sculpture—black and white photo—abstract painting—it is art that has achieved the state of being perceived as moving/breathing while simultaneously fixed—stable movement—float; glow is determined by the medium.

There is an art term Sfumato, meaning fume, or smoke, or smokiness. It was developed by Leonardo Da Vinci and was the moment in art history that artists recognized the value of glow, or glowiness. The Mona Lisa exemplifies that moment best—the face glows—and artists have been set to create glowiness ever since. That said, even hard-edge abstractions can create glow depending on use of color.

Color: In the late 40s and 50s Dr. Max Luscher worked with WWII vets and color. He’d place eight colored cards before the subject—the three primaries, the three secondaries, a gray, and a black—and would ask them to choose their most preferred color; and then ask again until the colors were recorded most liked to least liked. What he discovered, because our bodies react physiologically to light—color and color combination is depiction of a human emotional state. Two colors is a distinct emotional state, three and four colors are more refined/sophisticated emotional states, but generally, once a piece of art has five or more colors it becomes emotionally ambiguous. That said, using all the primaries and secondaries in a piece approximates light itself, and has its emotional value in that. Art that has five or more colors but fails to approximate light is what we might call common vomit art, where the artist is still figuring out how to work with color. One of the jobs of the artist is to create a color combination that is unusual but inviting, which many times is simply an extension of the artist themselves, using colors that resonate with them at that time.

It would seem an inanity the rubric of “float and glow” but all art of the past and all art of the future is judged by it. Any piece one deems great will have it.