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Inspired in Manhattan
Contemplating two incredible artists and why we create
There’s something in the depth of human experience that goes untapped — a force that bursts with rivers of color and gusts of sound, waves of light, a galaxy of potential. This is the space where the most beautiful artwork often derives.
While in New York City this past week, my girlfriend and I visited the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art). Nothing really spoke to me until I visited an exhibition of the artist Jack Whitten.
Whitten’s unique style evolved from decade to decade throughout the second half of the 20th-century, and each decade had me in awe.
The pieces don’t portray the physical world, not as we know it, at least. Rather, each piece feels like a celestial assemblage of color and texture and materials that communicate an ambiguous message.
The next day we saw an exhibition at the Met (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) from the 19th-century German artist Caspar David Friedrich.
His oil paintings show distant shores. Mountaintops. Graves in precarious places, standing to the wind. Friedrich’s work imparts the grandeur of nature, reality as we know it. He paints ruins. Forgotten places where new life grows.
