Thursday, October 22, 2009

Cracked Leather


Today, I found this great shot by Camilla Engman [camilla engman]
It is so beautiful - it has such a sense of comfort and it's so aesthetically interesting, with the cracks in the leather making such intricate organic lines and shapes contrasted with the regimented stitching. It's quite abstract, really, even though we can easily tell what it is.

I love this aspect of an image, and through my time at art school, I've learned to look at something familiar in a different way, to break down the quotidien into a collection of abstract forms and colours - a necessity for analysing an image. Whether it be a constructivist sculpture, a renaissance painting or Engman's lovely photo; art is never just an image but a conglomerate of shapes, forms, lines and colours that need to be recognised and appreciated in the abstract but also in the harmony they have in composition.

To appreciate a piece, one needs to analyse it, so that the individual components can be seen for their beauty, autonomously from the work as a whole, and from the viewers own preconceived ideas, biases and aesthetic preferences.

To like a piece, to feel inspired by it, to feel some sort of visual pleasure or to experience the sublimity of a work, the individual components need to be seen coexisting with each other harmoniously.

There's a big difference between these two experiences, although they are so dependent on each other and interlocking but yet need to be separated and then considered in context of each other.
...aye, there's the rub.

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