Spaces Between
Here’s a thought that I’ve been mulling over the past few days. It deals with art and with living, and is an analogy that started with my grandpa, and was completed today as I was contemplating some of the art in Ester’s blog. Ester, thank you very much, from the bottom of my heart. You have been the unknowing catalyst that helped me piece together a clue that my grandfather left me a long time ago.
Well, this post is dedicated to my grandpa, Alan Alexander, who was born in 1932, and died three years ago to this day. It is some of the wisdom that he passed on to me through his artwork that I want to share now.
A Line
Lines mark boundaries. They are a good for showing where one object or event ends, and where another begins. A line can be curved or straight. The human mind automatically creates lines to separate different objects.
Most importantly of all, a line does not exist. At least, they don’t exist in nature.
When we look at an object, and imagine a line at its edges, we are forgetting that the object has sides that are hidden from our view, sides that wrap around and only give us the illusion of a line. If we rotated that object, we’ll find that what we thought was a line was only there because of our perspective. Even corners are not true lines. On close inspection, corners are rounded off, and even sharp razor edges have multiple dimensions, opposite sides that (thanks to having two eyes) can both be seen at the same time.
Most importantly, when we concentrate on the lines, we miss the space between.
The Space Between
The subject of art isn’t the lines. When using an artistic medium that prevents representing an object in its true form, whether it be a charcoal pencil on paper or canvas, sound from a single speaker, words in a poem, or even (arguably) code in a computer program, the true art comes from the content between the lines. It comes from the transitions between one subject and the next. In code, the beauty lies in its implementation, how hidden it is from the user, and how natural the program acts to the person on the other side of the keyboard. In a poem, the beauty lies in the emotions and visualizations that the words bring. In music, it lies in the familiar patterns, as well as the deviations that conjure up imagery despite lacking any visual elements. In purely visual art, the beauty lies in the space between. Art is the intangible sense of completeness from an imperfect medium, that affects our senses beyond the ones that we use to simply perceive the artwork.
Similarly, there is an art to living. The lines that we draw to represent our past, present, and future are illusion created by our minds to encapsulate a broad range of experiences that never really had a beginning or ending. Today marks three years since a line I drew in my life, the day that my grandpa died. September 11th, 2001 marks a very bold and deep line in many people’s lives, but that line is blurred across several hours, days, and months, when we first realized that a tragedy was occurring to when we realized that the disaster was intentional, then with added shading as we experienced the grieving process, some moments painted red with anger, then black with grief, and almost completely blurred away with denial. Many of us have imagined lines in our lives, such as when we moved into our current house or apartment, got married, or when we switched jobs or graduated from school. When we inspect those lines closer, though, we find that there was a series of events that led up to where we placed that line, each on spanning blocks of time, rather than happening in one single moment. We have space between the major events of our lives. We can live for our major events and ignore the space between, or we can look at the spaces and plan how to fill them, what transitions to place in, and build our lives into works of art.
That is one of the things that my grandfather wanted to impress into me, and he succeeded, though he didn’t see my transition in his lifetime. Lines are illusions, simply handy tools so that the mind can more easily classify the space between. Similarly, events are illusions, and are another handy tool for the mind to classify the time between what seems important. If we are to be the artisans of our lives, we must recognize what the space between is and know how to fill it in order to bring out the art, that intangible, undefinable thing that creates such a large welling of emotion and completeness…
For the curious, here is a sample of my grandfather’s work. He is described as an Artist’s Artist, which means that much of his work is appreciated by other artists more than it is appreciated by the general public. This specific painting (acrylic on canvas, his usual medium.) is the only one available on the internet right now, but as a tribute to my grandfather, I am in the process of making art for displaying his art; I am coding an online gallery for him. Details will come as soon as the gallery is public, but please don’t hold your breath… I’m being a perfectionist about this project, so it will take quite some time.
EDIT: There is one thing that I would like to add. I mentioned a definition for art, but I would like to expand that definition when it applies to the art of living. I said that “Art is the intangible sense of completeness from an imperfect medium, that affects our senses beyond the ones that we use to simply perceive the artwork.” When we are artisans of our life, we have two perspectives to consider: our own, as the creators of the art, and other people’s perspectives as our audience. When we live consciously, being aware of the spaces between, we experience the full richness of life, just as an artist has an abstract representation of their subject in their mind in all of its completeness. When other people look at you when you are the artisan of your life, though, they don’t know the complete story, or feel the depth of your feelings. When you live in the spaces between, though, they can see that you have much more depth and passion. When you look at a person who is an artisan of their lives, or living consciously, you have an intangible sense of completeness from casual observation, which affects you in ways that observing other people doesn’t.
To me, Steve Pavlina, Jeff Lilly, and Ester Wilson seem like they have made their lives into art. They rarely speak to me directly, and when they do, only Jeff has talked to me about deep matters, but from observing them through their blogs, I can see a passion about their pursuits, and a determination that inspires me. I hope that they see me the same way, even though I have only come out of my proverbial shell quite recently, and I’m still working on being able to share my knowledge effectively and in a timely matter.
[…] and corners, with no regard for the spaces between. I have already written about the concept of the spaces between, which remains one of my favorite […]