there's this girl i know. i hesitate to call her friend because of the past year or so, yet she is someone for whom i care deeply. i've tried to explain the distance to myself so many times, but i suppose it's just the both of us, trying to be distant but foiling our own ends by pretending we're close. her bitterness and fear is palpable, just as much so as i imagine mine to be. a sad thing in the end, really.
i mention her because she was my roommate. when she first came she was an art major. she's meant for something else, but she chose art for her degree. she's much too organized to be an artist. anyway, the point is that i always feel so judged and belittled by her whenever i voice an opinion on art. granted, i'm not going to say that my opinions on the great masters' work is a well informed one, and i won't say i know more about theory or history than she does. i won't say that any skill that i have is more developed than hers; however, i do believe that i have a right to comment on art and what i believe it is.
first, there are two types of art that i see as very distinct but which have been often categorized as the same thing. Art and Craft. it's odd that those two words conjure up the images they do when a single 's' is added to the end of each, but the two words define the two facets quite neatly. art is a communication of something human to others, while craft is deliberate creation through skill. both have the capacity for immense creativity, inspiration and influence, but just because one calls the thing one creates 'art' does not immediately confer these qualities upon the work.
another quality that can distinguish pieces in either category is what i like to think of as 'open' and 'closed' pieces. i generally feel that an artist/craftsman creates one or the other on a regular basis, with unexpected appearances of the opposite on occasion.
open work is something quite indescribable. it'll cause you to stop at times, and stare. the female form is most often an open work in itself; men and women both have been captivated by it for ages. most pieces cheat a little and recreate that form in some medium or other... borrowing art from another artist. open art has a way of making you stare longer, come back to a piece again; the powerful pieces seem to send tendrils of themselves of some communication into your brain and lodge themselves there, like they were flowing into the place they were meant to be. as if there were some small void in one's being that was unfelt until something took its rightful place there.
closed work has much more of a finality. good work of this category feels stable, finished, complete. there's no yearning for completion in it, but a solidity like a boulder sunk into the soft ground with moss settling in its corners. or a smooth, unbroken field. pure geometrics seem to be the distilled form of this quality. they don't allow you to become a part of them, but instead rest beside you.
