When the Spell is Broken (oil on canvas, 2022)

Everyone will view a work of art in their own personal, subjective way. We bring to the experience of looking at art our own personality traits, history, tastes, prejudices, cultural associations, etc. so it is impossible for two people to have exactly the same experience when viewing a work of art. The same is true when it comes to reading books, listening to music, and watching films. We even have different experiences when we see the same work of art at different times in our lives because we have changed. I saw the exhibition of Andrew Wyeth’s Helga paintings and drawings in 1987 when had just left graduate school and I was underwhelmed by the work. This experience had nothing to do with the work and everything to do with me and what my priorities and interests were at the time, along with my inexperience and lack of fluency in visual language. This past Spring, a student brought a copy of the catalogue to that same exhibition to class and, upon looking through it, I was literally awestruck at the brilliance of the work, made all the more striking because of my previous experience. I immediately got on my phone and ordered a copy of the catalogue from eBay! Studying the work over the Summer, I became all too aware of how much our experience of viewing art has to do with us and not the artist.

Still, an artist who has knowledge of how to communicate effectively through the language of visual form and an understanding of their target audience can construct a work so that the majority of people that see it will have a somewhat similar experience. Oftentimes, this simply involves choosing subjects that are laden with symbolism and rendering them in an objectively realist style or a well-trodden style (e.g. Impressionism) that has obvious and proven connotations.

Other artists, however, choose to create work that encourages the viewer to have a very subjective experience. Their work is intentionally ambiguous. Rather than spoon feeding the meaning to the viewer, they challenge the viewer to find their own meaning in the work. Rather than presenting the viewer with a window that allows them to look out or in on something, they present a mirror, hopefully giving the viewer an opportunity to look inside themselves. Neither of these approaches is better than the other. It really comes down to what the artist’s intentions are. In my own work, I have transitioned away from creating images with fairly obvious meaning to works that are more ambiguous because I want people to have their own unique experience when they view my work. One of the greatest compliments I get is when I paint something from my imagination, and someone tells me that they recognize the place.