A Book…Industrial Style

Art does funny things to your brain. A while ago, my sister, niece, and I went to the Open Studios at Fort Point across the channel from the financial district in Boston. The studios are mostly in old brick warehouses used a long time ago for the wool trade and now home to an eclectic group of artists.

It’s a fun way to spend a Sunday, wandering in and out of artists’ studios looking at paintings, photography, jewelry, sculpture, handmade books, and mixed media collage. I also like seeing the way people live when the line between home and workplace is practically nonexistent.

Decor and lifestyle aside, what I’m really thinking about is how after I’ve spent time looking at art in a museum, gallery, studio, or artist’s home, something seems to shift in my brain, and I start to see things, if not artistically, at least more vividly.

The parking lot from a third-floor window suddenly becomes a grid of white lines and a checkerboard of curved car roofs; trees shimmer and make music; etched pine floors tell a story that could be hung on a wall. Textures like concrete, brick, rust, and old stone absorb my glance. The world seems to come into focus the way it did when I put on my first pair of glasses in sixth grade.

What is this altered state and why does looking intently at artistic expression trigger it? The Inuit believe that all objects and living things…a chair, a book, a stone, a rusty tin can, a gray cat…have a spirit that animates them. In the Inuit’s world, everything is shimmering with energy and presence. Perhaps it’s that capricious and mysterious presence that artists hope to recognize, explore, and present to us. And when we see it, we wake up, and something in our brain wakes up too.

So when the world is too much with us (or not enough with us), it’s a good thing to wander around a museum or a gallery or really look at that pinhole photograph of an abandoned factory that hangs in the back hall, mostly unnoticed now in our hustle-bustle haste.

Just imagine if everything were alive. And imagine, like an artist, living in that awareness. Even the walls have ears. And all the stones have a story to tell.