Art Heals: Looking at Art

Let’s talk about looking at art.  Oh, you say, isn’t that what we have been doing since we started reading these missives (I know you call them missives, rather than something perhaps less flattering).  Indeed, that is precisely what we have been doing, in my meandering fashion. 

Hisham Matar recently wrote in the New York Times, “[a painting] is never finished, [it] must continue to do its work long after it has been hung on the gallery wall…a picture relies on us to complete it.”  He posits that our culture depends on free access to museums, because the art depends on it.  “How can those paintings in the museum, hanging in the dark, function?”  He observes that an artwork, previously ignored by the passing viewer, can suddenly become significant.  “Art is in constant dialogue with history.”

Matar has expressed the core of my belief and explained why I offer you an artwork each day. Art not only has a function, it functions as a living thing. It lives as it is being created but continues to live more vibrantly when it is seen.  Almost as soon as I began my quarantine, receiving information and stimulation second hand, I realized that I missed more than my friends, and brunch, and travel, and shopping and an endless supply of Pringles. I missed looking at art.  It had become so much a part of my daily life, I only became aware of its allegiant presence by its absence.   And as I began to reflect on the fear and sadness brought by the pandemic that was not going to end soon, and on the resilience and ingenuity of people around the world living in their own isolation,  I knew I had to find some way to incorporate art into my daily life again.  As the news turned ever more dire, as death and job loss and loneliness began to consume people, I turned to art and the artists I knew, who were struggling with all this too.  I thought art might heal. In these last days, with the broken bodies and souls demanding to finally be heard, demanding long-delayed justice, I hoped art might play a small role in healing, too.  I certainly have no answers, but I hope art helps me to ask the right questions.  And I hope looking at art with me has given you some respite, a little laughter, a different point of view, a little healing. I want to share the work of one of “my” artists (they are my family, too), Lukman Ahmad’s portrait of George Floyd, painted, I know, in empathy by an artist who understands injustice and shares personally in pain. Art Heals.