I came across an interesting thought the other day.  Granted, it was in a trite, melodramatic bit of Star Trek fan-fiction, but days after I had finished the book, this thought came back and surprised me with its insight.

In the book, a woman sat in front of a painting every day, and claimed that every time she did, she saw something new in it, and learned something new about herself.  Her friend could not understand this one iota.  To him it was just a chaotic jumble of colors swirled around.  Completely meaningless.  And to be honest, that’s often how I’ve felt as well.

Modern art has never grabbed me.  Whether it was in music, painting, sculpting…I dismissed it all as the works of people too undisciplined to compose something that actually resembled….well, pretty much anything.  If you’ve ever tried to write a song, you know it’s not just throwing a bunch of notes down wherever you feel like.  The melody has to go somewhere.  And usually, it has to come back again, or you begin to feel like the song isn’t going anywhere at all, just meandering on forever.  You have to know what notes to put with others for each particular type of harmony.  It doesn’t arrive by chance.

If you’ve ever tried to draw a portrait, you know that you can’t just sit down and draw a bunch of lines and have it come out looking like the person you’re drawing.  (Maybe some people can, and blessings on their talent and genius, but most of us can’t.)  You have to pay careful attention to proportions, shading, and perspective. 

And yet, when modern art has crossed my path, it seems that the artist did just that.  They closed their eyes and threw their brushes at the canvas.  Then they closed their eyes again and drew out a slip of paper from their bag of random words and emotions, and called it the “title” of this “masterpiece.”

Maybe that’s what they do.  I don’t know.  And to be honest, it really doesn’t matter.  Whatever their methods, and whatever their motivations, what has changed is the way I view a piece, and the way it impacts me.

I think modern art really does teach us about ourselves.  Wow.  What a hokey, relativistic, swamis-on-mountains, trancey, in-touch-with-nature-and-our-inner-selves thing to say.  But hear me out.  This should all make sense by the end. 

Let’s use an example.  I did a google search for modern art and then clicked on “images.”  I pulled up a painting that is basically a bunch of fairly muted colors swirled in wavy, curly stripes.  And I looked at it.  All at once, I noticed one particular black stripe that goes from the top to the bottom of the painting like a path.  To me it looks like a bottomless chasm.  Beside it is a white stripe that follows the same curves.  The white stripe starts out really wide at the top, and then gets so narrow that it almost disappears into the black before widening again on its way to the bottom.  As I looked at it, I was suddenly reminded of a couple verses from the Bible.  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”  “The way is straight and narrow, and few there be that find it.”  And I thought of the part in Pilgrim’s Progress where they are walking through the valley of the shadow of death, and there are pits on both sides that lead straight to Hell.  That idea, of walking along a narrow path, knowing that any wrong move could send me over the edge scares me.  It’s an analogy that can be applied to so many things.  Christians can apply it to their spiritual journey through life towards eternity.  Bullied kids might feel like that path is their self-esteem, with those pits being full of people jeering at  them, trying to trip them, and anything to get them to fall off.  Someone struggling to make ends meet might see those pits full of their financial responsibilities.  For me, the path is my purpose in life.  The things God wants me to accomplish.  And the things in that pit are my faults.  My selfishness, procrastination, lack of discipline, pride, insecurity…all of those things have their long sticky fingers curled around my ankles.  I am always peeling them off again.  They are unrelenting.  Sometimes I find myself crawling on my hands and knees because they’ve pulled me down so far.  Sometimes I stop completely, sitting cross-legged on the path, the only strength I have left devoted to not falling off completely.

This is all from two swirls.  There are a lot more swirls for everyone else to choose from.  Now, what if it really had been a painting of a narrow path with chasms on each side?  To me, that would be powerful, but I wouldn’t have had to come up with it myself.  It wouldn’t have anymore “swirls” for someone else to make into their own totally different picture.

I’m not trying to say that it’s better than realism, not by any means.  But I feel like I would have missed out on something if I would never have seen this painting and would never have put that extra effort into seeing something in it.

Maybe I have an overactive imagination.  Maybe I really am into that trancey, in-touch-with-my-inner-self stuff.  Regardless of that, I have this mental picture to pull up in my mind to remind me to keep peeling those sticky fingers off.  And the next time I’m at a museum, and I pass some mangled mass of wires sitting on a pedestal, I might actually stop and look at it, instead of blowing past on my way to the collection of Andrew Wyeth.

http://www.milesmodernart.com/modern-art-41108-24x48