[two] capturing "essence" + "The Idea of Order at Key West"

For more than two years, I have worked in an art gallery in Albuquerque, New Mexico and I am continually amused by our customers and their reactions to that artwork we carry. With my training as a fine arts student, I tend to gravitate towards the “more painterly”/impressionistic works in the gallery. Many customers, on the other hand, seem to like works that are highly realistic and/or photographic-looking. Now, I can appreciate the work of artists who render every tiny detail but it is simply not my cup of tea because many of these “hyper-realistic” art pieces seem to be “flatter” when compared to say a work created by a painter who skillfully captured “the essence” of their subject. If a photograph of a great work of art cannot do the piece justice, how could a photograph capture the highly complex nature and “essence” of something like the sea?

 Fine arts students are trained to explore a subject repeatedly, like the human figure, landscape, animal, etc., in order to build a “mental catalog” of the subject. Once one has studied a specific subject for any length of time, one can more easily render and successfully illustrate “the essence” of their subject to a viewer. Throughout history, many artists have monopolized on our brain’s ability to create associations between different events, facts, etc., in order to retrieve knowledge from past artistic studies so that they may better capture the essence of a given subject with each new drawing, painting, etc. Famous artists like Leonardo Da Vinci and Albrecht Durer made continual sketches/studies of things like animals in order to gain a better understanding of their subject’s physical characteristics, behaviors and other nuances that only come from lengthy and careful study. In Wallace Steven’s poem “The Idea of Order at Key West”, the singing, female figure could be used as a metaphor for an artist’s careful study of a subject, like the ocean, in order to better translate “the essence” of that subject to someone who has perhaps never seen something like the sea before. In fact, one of the major reasons why many historians believe art emerged in the first place was because Paleolithic humans wanted the ability to describe and categorize their world before the advent of spoken or written language. Examples of this include the prehistoric caves in Lascaux, France where humans painted pictures of animals like bison and mammoth. These pictures are by no means highly realistic, especially since almost all are simple profiles of various animals, but they do capture the essence of the subjects painted. Cave paintings probably served to help humans teach each other about things/places/animals they may have never encountered before. This may have ultimately aided in the survival of human species because there was no language present that might have aided in the creation of signs that would say “bison are have sharp horns, run quickly, and are large and dangerous; proceed towards them at your own risk”. (Think of the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words”). To create art is to survive because it has helped humanity make sense of and order almost everything we encounter, thus allowing us to make informed judgments about how to hunt our next dinner to staying out of Hell (in the case of various forms of religious artwork). However, in places like Yellowstone, sometimes even clearly worded signs fail to deter modern tourists from getting too close to wild animals like bison and bears. Someone should have taken some advice from the crude but effective paintings of their prehistoric ancestors.