Brain Food #443
Imagining the sea
Daily Brain Food.
Thoughts of the day
Lacking the fidelity of a photograph, one is never sure if the representation of a moment that they see in a painting is something taken out of real life, or whether it is an imaginary landscape or scene.
This mere idea made me think of the sea, which we might not see for a while.
Ocean, a pencil drawing of the sea by Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins, depicts the simultaneously still and wavy surface of the water in near-photographic detail. The ocean is free, unpredictable, still largely undiscovered. The painting itself is dark, mysterious, ambivalent, perhaps acknowledging that no painting or image can capture the true essence of the ocean.
Looking at a painting of something that is as constantly changing as the sea places you somewhere between reality and the imagination, both of the viewer and of the artist. Through the limitations of the medium, we paradoxically become free to imagine.
