I see the world quite differently than many. I believe in vision, more than anything else and I believe it brings permanency to life.
Being an art lover, and collector for some time, I see people who have put their hearts behind a pallet and painted what they believe to be vision. It’s been handed down through decades of belief. I watched a series today on the world’s worst jobs in history and a few of them belonged to painters and their models.
The model in the Renissance era had to often pose for 3 hours because of the details the painters were so obsessed with. Often these people were poor and earned very little. They were expected to maintain a pose without motion for hours, sometimes holding up their arms in various ways. They had to hold ropes to ease the pain in their limbs. One particularly well-known male model was found in a shelter and because of his bushy beard and muscular body, he was used many times by the great painters of the era. For women, it was worse than prostitution, and paid for less than males. Many of these people were chosen from the poor and paid little, but would do it nonetheless.
One particular painter had to paint the inside of the dome in one of Christopher Wren’s Cathedral’s in England being up 75 feet on very unsturdy scaffolding. Today, it still lasts and they’re doing restoration on the cathedral, so we could get a first hand look at it close up.
When you think of the permanency of paint, I think of the future. The painter is often doing a pictorial in time of their feelings, their perceptions, their beliefs and meshing them together with current events, situations, memories, readings and such. If they’re good, their paint lasts many generations, outlasts their certainly in life and many of their children’s children.
I never thought I’d last very long in life. There was a time I came very close to the end, which in retrospect could be told in a pretty funny story about Parrot Fever. Regardless, when you have a life altering experience as such, you begin to think about what it is you’d leave behind, what difference you’d make to the world, how is it you’d leave.
Painters are not just artists with a paintbrush… no sir… they’re artists with cameras, they’re artists with instruments and recordings, they’re artists with a gift for logic and perhaps a spoken word, they’re people who put together a future and paint it in the way they do it- Dance, plays, computer graphics, movies, a merge of many disciplines. Artists are believers- they bring forth new worlds- they paint pictures which alter perceptions, to indeed create exactly that.
I’ve commissioned a painting or two because I had a vision which I wanted to be a permanent reminder- something I wouldn’t forget and something to continue me on the struggle. I’m not one with a lot of vanity, but I believe in the good of making your visions come true. For me, painting is the first step. As one vision feeds into another, another is created somewhere else who may be inspired by the vision which preceded them. I hope in some ways to give the gifts of inspiration to those who truly need them, or cross them in passing. It’s all I ever really want. Poetic as that may be.
For if I died tomorrow, I think I feel I’ve done pretty well and painted a picture for others, who indeed painted pictures for me. Thank you readers, thank you friends … THANK YOU!