Visual artists see lights, shadows, lines, colors, tones, shapes, spaces, and textures that ordinary eyes can’t see.
I am privileged to have many friends in this field. And I am in awe of the master artists whose magnum opuses are in famed museums all over the world and whose works command millions of dollars.
Wow, what imagination!
Yet Plato asserted that when artists are using their imagination, they are simply imitating. In his Theory of the Forms, Plato wrote that art imitates physical things (mimesis), and physical things imitate forms. Therefore, “art is a copy of a copy.”
How so? Plato explains through the metaphor of the three beds:
One bed is an idea created by God. The second bed is created by a carpenter who imitates God’s idea. The painter than imitates the carpenter’s bed by painting it. Ergo, the artist’s bed is twice removed from the truth.
Artists, therefore, can only imitate so much, because our God of grace, the original Artist, has endless ideas. This I found out with great reverence while Googling images of flowers. (Yes, I will dare paint flowers again while the pandemic rages on.)
We are all familiar with many blooms in our garden and in flower shops. But do we even know how many rare flowers there are in the world? I discovered more than a hundred (I am sure there are more in some hinterlands somewhere) and I am sharing with you a few that kept me gushing till I ran out of breath.
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