Apricot Sky, Tualatin
9x12 oil
If you feel an emotion from a piece of art, it’s not the art that’s giving it to you. That emotion already exists within you. But the art ignites it, and carries it to the surface.
The catalyst can be anything, really, not just art — a song, the smell of a yellow pencil, a cat walking on you while you nap, a long stretch of sunlight streaking across a field of wheat. It can be a multitude of things.
Whenever I hear “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine” by Gale Garnet, or “Stranger on the Shore” by Acker Bilk, I go back — instantly — to my teenage years. I’m miles out to sea, rocking and swaying with Barbara Young on the roof of my step-father’s 38-foot deep-sea charter fishing boat; or standing on the side of the road with Tommy Holmes just before dawn, trying to hitch a ride from Kamuela to Kailua-Kona for a day of surfing. Simple songs that of themselves do nothing. But when they weave into my history they evoke emotions, in the two cases above, deep, rich, powerful memories that dang near choke me up, so immensely grateful am I to have lived those amazing experiences.
This is why I love art. It makes me feel something. It evokes profound gratitude.
Art amplifies my life.
