Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Movements

When I was younger and would return home with a movie selection from Blockbuster, my mother would ask, "Did you get one of your artsy movies again?"  I didn't know what that meant.  To me, I saw beauty in film, in shots, in movements.  I still do.  Five minutes into Kieslowski's Red, she started snoring.

Now it is 2012.  I am in the middle of Beginners.  I hear Bach's cello.


I don't know when or where I first heard this piece, but somehow it makes me feel like a familiar acquaintance is calling to me. 

What is it about certain songs, certain films, certain art that stirs memory and feelings whose origins we can't begin to explain?  Why is it that I can look at a portrait and follow the contours of a woman's face, a man's lips, a tree's extension, and a person can walk behind me and ask, "What's the point?" 

I've always loved the complexity of art.  How something I see so clearly can perplex the next viewer.  My boyfriend and I once found ourselves standing in a hotel lobby.  There was a sculpture of horse surrounded by small men, scaffolding, and tools.  I said, "Interesting.  They are deconstructing the horse,"  to which he responded, "I thought they were building him."

It is, in fact, the building of art that is in itself a complexity.  

I miss the days that I was surrounded by fellow artists.  Painting parties.  Poetry workshops.  Foreign film screenings.  I thrived during these moments.  I was no longer the lonely artist. 

But with time comes change, and the people I was once surrounded by on a daily basis have now moved to different parts of the world.  I read their works at a distance.  See their faces in a virtual world.  And I long to connect to that energy we once created.  An energy that can only be generated by art.

I long for new beginnings.