What Art Sees in Us

The building I live in hosted an informal gathering where some resident artists, including my wife, presented their work in the communal space. My friend Sidney, whom I hadn’t seen in years, showed up dressed like an art critic. The last time I saw him, he looked more like Santa Claus.

When I look at people’s artwork, how I see them often changes dramatically, not always for the better, but in this case, it was. A picture is worth a thousand words—maybe quite a bit more. That’s why it can be terrifying for an artist.

Sidney and I stood in front of seven tiny paintings. I didn’t know what to make of them. One thing was clear: there was no logic to what was going on in them. Sidney said he liked them because whatever he saw in them was purely a reflection of himself. A sharp observation. It hadn’t occurred to me, but I realized it was true. I guess our art school was good for something after all.

“Surreal” would be the wrong word, at least if you mean dreamlike, because dreams have symbolic functions. These paintings seemed to defy logic entirely. Despite the presence of symbols, my cognitive brain couldn’t grasp anything. They resisted interpretation. So if you had one, it likely said more about you than the artist, like a Rorschach test. And the fact that there were seven of them proved it wasn’t an accident.

We eventually spoke with the artist, though he didn’t seem to consider himself one. It was just something he enjoyed doing, he explained. I asked about his process, whether he had a sense of what he wanted to paint before picking up a brush. He said no; it just begins and ends wherever it does. I told him that’s a talent. I couldn’t do it. The cognitive part of my brain would dominate the process, and the rest wouldn’t stand a chance of expressing themselves without passing the approval mechanism of my prefrontal cortex.

Art reminds us that our worldview is enframed by what we’ve learned. Because cognition is limited by the frameworks we inherit, an artwork can confront us as a kind of radical alterity, something that resists comprehension, but a hint of its existence is enough to transform how we perceive the world.