Public art . . what was the artist thinking?

What is it that artists contribute to our experience of life? To our culture? To our sense of purpose and meaning? To the quality of our lives?

Practical things, for sure. If you look around, chances are that almost everything you see has been designed by an artist. The chair you're sitting on, the ring on your finger, the pen in your hand, your keyboard. Everything that moves us forward as a society comes out of the creative process.

Artists explore the world we live in with the expression of their beings. In other culture, they're Shamans, they see things and can't avoid communicating what they see.


Artists make tactile an idea, they give coluor to an insight, shape to an observation. They put in context things intuited. And when their creativity meshes just so with their materials it is without words, sublime. It's not always beautiful, but it's a meditation on life.

With Lotus in Motion, artist Gordon Halloran reflects on nature. in Smile of the Buddha, Hippolyte Taine's short passage juxtaposed with contemplation on Monet's water lilies, resonates:

"Nature is . . . an infinite chain of causes from effects and effects from causes, an infinite progeny into the past and the future of decompositions and recompositions with no beginning and no end."


I'll leave you with that for today.