Communication in partnership: beauty, the maker and the receiver.

It’s a tricky thing, this making of images, because while it may seem to the maker that it is an individual process, what has been made must now communicate with viewers if the circle is to be completed. While the artist must work with ‘knowledge, sensitiveness and imagination’ if he wishes his work to be taken seriously, it is important to understand that the viewer must expect to put the same serious thought into it. The meeting is not so much between minds but somewhere out there where new thought is developed, hovering in the air between the work of art and the viewer. It is as if the artist pushes the idea forward into view and the viewer must be alert to receive it and be ready to make a similar leap into new awareness. The following quote from a book I read recently expresses this thought well.

“Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is the melody that he sings for you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination”.


‘The Moon and Sixpence’. By Somerset Maugham