The truth is that we interpret everything through our own experiences and beliefs, applying our understanding and perceptions of life to the situations we encounter. What one person perceives as positive, another will perceive as negative.
At my recent exhibit I was amazed at the interpretations that people had for certain pictures. Sometimes, their interpretation synced with mine, but mostly it didn't. I was fascinated by what others were seeing. A couple of friends of mine hadn't seen the piece, "The Soul Becomes Dyed." The tortured look of the guy on the left was too "real" for them and they were unable to look at the picture for long. Both of them are veterans of the war in Iraq, one of them seriously wounded in a landmine explosion. Their perception of the tortured face in the painting affected them in ways far outside my realm of experience. They were unable to hear the "message" of the quote because of their perception of that face. It saddened my heart as I gained greater insight into some of the trauma they had experienced at a very young age.
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| The Soul Becomes Dyed, Mixed Media Collage, 20" x 25.75" |
Several people had reacted with tears to another piece on vulnerability, that touched them on some very deep level. Yet another young woman was wanting to know the Biblical basis for a collage on the cycle of life, talking to me for a good twenty minutes, trying to ascertain the "message," the exact Biblical quotes I had been thinking of, and fit it into her religious belief system. She was assigning a depth into the picture that was not consciously in my mind when I made that piece. I often look at a completed piece and see all kinds of things in the picture that I had not intentionally considered. While I often have a quote in mind when working, or am trying to make sense of something in my own life, my intuitive side frequently comes shining through in my artwork with amazing regularity and depth.
Art is therapy for me. It's how I process life's mental and emotional ups and downs. In the case of the tortured guy I was having a rough day, so I grabbed a piece of charcoal and started putting all that emotional energy onto the paper as a way of releasing it. I didn't want to leave myself empty at that point, so I found a picture of a guy laughing and drew him as well. This happened back in the early 90s and I've hung on to these two drawings for years. They finally ended up in this collage with the quote by Marcus Aurelius, "The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts." That quote is the essence of the lesson I had been learning.
I had come to understand that emotions are the color in life, not the purpose. I had been struggling for years to get my emotions under some kind of control that didn't embarrass me on a regular basis. In that struggle I went through a period where it seemed I felt little emotion at all. The world was black and white and I wasn't liking that at all when it came to living a daily life. As I pursued greater understanding I discovered what I believe to be the purpose of emotions, which is, to bring color to life, and it is attached to our thought life. Emotion gives meaning to life, enabling us to "feel", to participate in life in a much greater depth than would be possible without it.
However, it is so easy to let emotions run amok and cause all kinds of damage in one's life. We rarely seem to understand the connection between our thoughts and our emotions. Most think that emotions come before thoughts when in fact it is the other way around. Like a light almost instantaneously following the flipping of the switch, emotions follow the course of our thoughts. It is no easy matter to separate the two. It requires a lot of work and energy to "split that atom," not to mention great courage to dig that deep into our own psyche. The pain of that process can be, and often is, very intense. We hate being uncomfortable in that way.
The Soul Becomes Dyed was for me a beginning realization of all this stuff, just as "heavy" to me as the pain of the realness of the tortured face was to my friends, just in a different way. But where their interpretation took on a negative effect, my overall perception of this artwork is actually positive. It reminds me to monitor my thoughts and emotions, remembering the connection between positive thoughts and positive emotions, and vice versa. It reminds me that I can control my thought life when I choose to do so. It also reminds me that my happiness comes from within, not without. It is a state of mind engendered by my thoughts and colored by my emotions. It's all about individual perceptions determining the interpretation.
Please feel free to share your perceptions and interpretation in the comments below.
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