Rebalancing

It’s Sunday, but it doesn’t feel like it.  Last week was rainy and totally free – perfect for turning inward.  This week we have had classes all day and it is downright gorgeous outside.  There is a festival going on just outside the villa, so the noise is reverberating around the valley – preventing that most sacred of customs, the Sunday nap.  The classes have been a continuation of challenging our perspectives, literally and figuratively.  I’m going to expand on that as I listen to the water soothing and smoothing the atmosphere in my body and soul.
There are a couple of thoughts that have grabbed me this week.  The first is that I now have so many different ways of looking at the physical world than I did two weeks ago.  Bee gave me brushstrokes and warmth and coolness which gave me new appreciation of what I saw around me.  I learned color from her and was getting much better at portraying the world from those basics.  All of a sudden I have been introduced to perspective lines which are giving shape and substance to objects I had previously just shaded, not understood.  Then they throw negative space into the negative space of my brain – looking at the spaces created between objects, not just the objects.  So now the simple act of painting in color is starting to require looking at the underpinning of line and perspective.

Adjusting to that would not be too bad in and of itself.  But photography has a whole new world of color theory, new tools to master, and light is regulated in a whole new direction.  The eyes and the brain must expand my world in so many new directions.  It is exciting.  It is also exhausting.  It is mostly humiliating as I try to practice each art in turn.  Being a beginner in the presence of those much further along the path is not easy.  I never knew how vain/proud I am.  Patience and perserverance will be necessary – but not easy for me to execute.

The other thought from this week has to do with balance.  We have been concentrating totally on Renaissance art when not in practicums.  Obsessively so – example, we were in the Uffizi looking for a particular Titian painting.  The class wandered down a corridor and discovered a whole room full of Rembrandts which the professor wouldn’t let us go into because it didn’t have anything to do with the Italian renaissance.  Can you imagine being denied Rembrandt when there are only a couple of feet separating you?  And yes, I was defiant enough to go into the room anyway…I have finally embraced the concept of “I’m too old for this”  when confronting authority.  Another example – we were in Venice for 3 days and never once was Marco Polo mentioned. 

The study of art is important.  The study of politics and economics are important.  The study of history is important.  The need for things spiritual is important.  But how do we combine and balance importance so the combination becomes full of integrity and power?  Compartmentalization is helpful but doesn’t necessarily lead to comprehension: rather it should be a means or a tool to use in order to start the understanding process. 

Education furthers these dichotomies just because we take individual classes based on a predetermined specialties – Elizabeth poetry, Acting, Early American history, etc.  Maybe we need to add new ways of looking at the world just like I have had to add new ways of seeing the world.  What if we taught history by years – 1603 for example and see how the whole world was living and moving and creating?  How did the peoples of Africa or Peru or China handle life and what were the issues that bothered them at that time?  How is that different than what we are doing right now?  I admit I am prejudiced at the need for patterns and meaning.  But I’m too old for putting up with anything less than that.  I’m also not creative enough to devise a new way of study – but I definitey see the need to start the conversation.

So my take away this week is that seeing the world as a unity required looking at the world in new ways.  Simple to say but not easy to impement in my own life.  But I’ll enjoy the challenge.