In popular literature, the artist is an ethereal being, unconcerned with the crass and material world. Last Sunday, this illusion was rudely shattered, along with my ankle (in three places).
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I was innocently showering, in preparation for departing on a journey of artistic discovery including, I hoped visits to numerous museums and much time spent with my beloved brushes, when a slippery floor and gravity transformed the museums into Delray Medical Center and the brushes into the full panoply of the surgical suite.
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Now, I’m hopping about with a walker and riding in a wheelchair… and still in Delray Beach. Fortunately, I still have my reading and am drawing inspiration from one on Monet. You see, Monet found his artistic calling during a period of medical convalescence. The then lawyer Monet was given a present of painting materials from his mother while he was recovering from appendicitis, and the world lost a lawyer and gained an artist…. a double gain in most people’s view of society.
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Maybe I’ll find my muse amid the continual frustrations of being a one-legged woman in the land of the fully-abled.
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While Monet made a huge change in his life, I don’t feel that I’m really making a big one in mine,. I’ve always found beauty in things like gardening and cooking, the science of the recipe and the art of the multifaceted presentation. The connections, the parallels, are there for anyone to feel.
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I’ve been pondering more and more the fusion of art and science and wondering why for most of my life I’ve seen my course to be mainly within the sciences. I don’t view this with regret, only with a kind of bemused realization as the connections fall together.
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My inspiration is Leonardo da Vinci, the true master of combining art and science. He was the one who changed concept of “artist” from “mere craftsman” to “genius.” However, the process was a gradual one, changing only as brilliant historians, capable of thinking out-of-the-box, came to realize his notebooks contained scientific as well as artistic musings.
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This sets me wondering, in The Great Scheme of Things, what is the relationship of art to science? Leonardo’s paintings don’t overtly trumpet scientific principles. They are Art; they are Beautiful; they nourish the Soul. However, I wonder if I can find a way to make scientific principles more “real” to those who simply experience it rather than formally study it, in much the way they experience gravity in much the same way I experienced it in my shower.
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I have an intuitive, gut feeling that it can be done. I think that art can illuminate what it is that our world is manifesting. Art reflects more than the society and culture of which it is part. I see it reflecting all of the elements of its era and world.
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I’m struggling with this concept, but some images have come to me, and as I struggle to translate them into my work, I hope I’ll be able to bring some clarity to you… and to me.
