“Renewal” Fairy in Keyhole.

The Keyhole by Boochi

Tsst! Tsst!

Hey! Hey…

Take a peek

Take a peek. Yes, take a peek here.

I want you to take a peek in this keyhole and see what I see.

Do you see it? The world outside behind this door?

Do you see it? That is where reality and dreams collide.

It’s beautiful.

The world out there is amazingly beautiful.

God created such an amazing art.

It’s a masterpiece.

The nature, the animals, the mankind, the birds, and the skies.

Life is wonderful. It’s colorful.

He is a painter. 

A brilliant artist.

He is an artist who created more artists to collaborate with.

He created the human artists to add more to His canvas. 

To add more colors, more life, more stories.

The world is like a mega-sized canvas and it’s amazingly beautiful.

It’s wonderful. It is colorful.

Behind this door, most artists stayed painting on canvases.

Adding more art to the mega-sized canvas.

A canvas within a canvas.

Every hour, every day, every week, every year we paint, paint, and paint and make more art.

Behind this door, more colors, more life, more stories were made.

Making art from inspiration.

Making art from what we see.

Making art from motivation, emotion, determination, suppression.

We make art from our imagination.

We have the ability to imagine, to create and be creative.

We are the artists, the human artists.

The world outside this door is the mega-sized canvas. 

That is where reality and dreams collide.

The mega-sized canvas is also a magic canvas.

It changes in time. 

New places, new people, new art, new and even more artists.

New concepts, new dreams, new ideas, new culture arises.

Everything is art, and it can shape shift.

Everything is art, and it can change you.

Art can change you, me, him, her, they, everybody!

Everybody! 

Them, us, we change art.

We are the artists, and our imaginations can create something new.

It can influence and change other people, too.

We all add something new to the mega-sized canvas.

We add more and more colors, more life, and more stories.

Take a peek at the keyhole. What you’ll see is the world outside. 

Yes, it changes in time.

Because that’s where reality and dreams collide.

There she is! It’s Elsie. She looks fresh-faced and jolly in spite of the freezing weather of Ohio. She smiles every car or person passing by. Day and night she is up there and seemingly telling you that life is awesome and each day is exciting. Here, have some milk!

Billboard advertisements: They’re most evidently can be seen up on the building walls, alongside freeways and highways, everywhere in each and every corner of the street, varying in large and small sizes. Ads are like the cave art of today. The cave is the city. It has many concrete buildings towering over each other on both sides of the streets. With them are different random billboards that have images and words or just words, but each has a story and a purpose. Ads are out there to add beauty, to attract people, to promote something, to add life! Without them, the city would look dull, empty, boring. Same thing with the cave art, the cave would have nothing but walls and rocks without it.

We are living in the world full of art ever since the early days. Today, we see pictures of advertisements on the streets, tall buildings in cities with some of them having intricate or peculiar but jaw dropping architectural designs, and much more. What would life be without art? We won’t probably have any of what we already have now.  Life would be dull; it would be a chaos.

During the prehistoric times, there are evidences that humans were already able to create art. It was during the Neolithic Era that art was starting to completely develop. The patterns or images the early people put on their vases or other items used for food preservation and other storage purposes served as marks to distinguish a person’s own property. That was just an example to avoid confusion of who really owns this and that.

Art has also became part of religion. For example, Christians seem to be moved by images of Christ’s suffering and death on the cross. They feel guilt and gratitude to Jesus for saving them from the deadly sins. They would no longer suffer in the burning fires of hell because they are forgiven; there is hope. Visual representations of hell frightened believers from doing something sinful to their peers. Thus, it results in lesser crime rates within a society of people living with fear of God.

Art may represent ideas and emotions that cannot be explained using words of mouth. The artist’s way to be understood or just to express and see how other people understand and react is through his or her art. Every art made has its purpose. It could be to add beauty, to draw people’s attention, to be appreciated, to bring order, etc., etc. It could be anything!

The thought of God was a great factor in the creation of art. The thought of Him had brought humans of almost all cultures to make symbols or images of their creator and to build amazingly engineered and decorated house of worship like churches and mosques. Since the early times, people have used art to paint into other people’s minds the stories and sayings reminding why we should believe.

The early Christians had gone across different places with a mission to spread Christianity all over the world. It wasn’t an easy task, but they were able to greatly impact and convert many nations causing pagan religions to diminish. The perfect classical statues of the gods were destroyed. They were replaced by mostly images of Christ’s savagely beaten body and his sufferings and death on the cross. An example is the Isenheim Altarpiece in France. It was painted by a German artist named Matthias Grünewald. Even though the painting is only a visual depiction of what Jesus might have looked like in the past according to the scriptures, people who look at him would have the feeling of awe and repentance. His face reminds us that he sacrificed his life in order to save us all from sins and to be forgiven by God the Father. 

On the other hand, the Muslims have a doctrine forbidding the depiction of God— also called Allah in the Arabic language— in a human or animal form because it may result in idol-worship. Instead, the sacred sayings from the holy book of Islam, the Qur’an, were made into visual patterns along with other geometric, floral, and plant motifs in mosques like the ones seen in the Great Mosque of Cordoba located in Spain. There are patterns there that could be suggesting symbolic meanings. The seemingly endless and systematically ordered designs could mean unity under God’s order.

Another spiritual dwelling that seems to make a person feel God’s transcendence, especially once he or she steps inside, is the Chartres Cathedral. It is a Gothic church situated in France. Its ceilings are so high, and the doorways and windows are unbelievably gigantic. Anyone who enters would feel like an ant inside. When the choir sings and the organ plays, all the sounds echo. It is like hearing the voices of angels and the loud drowning sound of the trumpets. The cathedral also has magnificent colorful stained glass and rose windows. Their gem-like colors and the small amount of light the glass only allows to go in appear to represent a vision of heavenly splendor.

It is also amazing how the overwhelmingly huge Gothic structures are standing for ages. It could be because God is infinite in existence and power. That is why during the Medieval times, people thought of building churches that were sturdy enough to last for a lifetime by coming up with some architectural inventions. The arches that can be seen along the nave and extending on the outside of the church walls are called flying buttresses. They are like fingers holding up the walls, keeping the whole place from falling apart and helping to withstand harsh weather conditions. 

References

“Flying buttress” tudorhistory.org. Web. Accessed on 4 July 2012. <http://tudorhistory.org/glossaries/f/flying_buttress.html>

O’Mahony, M. World Art: The Essential Illustrated History. Star Fire Publishing, 2007. Print.

Matthew Collings “This is Civilisation Ep.1.” 21-23 June 2008. Online video. Youtube. Accessed on 1 July 2012.

Art has been created by man since way back time, and no one exactly knows why he made such images. Maybe he used it for recording events that was going on in his environment, for performing rituals, for making representations of God or his gods, for expressing himself, or simply for beautification purposes only. Whatever the reason is, I know art has always been a part of people’s lives. I believe nothing is anything without the past and the art that was created along with it. 

More than 3,400 years ago, the Egyptians had documented their history by using hieroglyphs, a writing consists of symbolic images carved on stones, inscribed on the papyrus paper, and painted on the walls of the Egyptian tombs. Written down, together with paintings of the Egyptian people or stereotypes, were events, pharaohs’ biographies, their gods, and stories that depict what was going on around Egypt during their age and time. The reason why they made hieroglyphs could be to remember something or to be remembered. That is where the story lies hoping to continuously preserve their culture for future generations.

Art had reflected man’s desire to explain the world around him through writings and paintings of rigid stereotypes. In time, man made his art with such naturalistic details. He finally made the ideal man.

Art portrayed the realization of man’s ideas of human potential. The ancient Greeks sculpted their gods to look exactly like humans, making a type of art that mirrors us directly. They made beautiful marvels that are lifelike and detailed; they were perfect. Their art shows full of ideas about how the way things work; how it is to be alive and to be victorious.

Man had seen himself through art. He questioned himself and made reasons. Because of it, somehow his understanding of who he was changed, and new ideas of his potential suddenly came up, expressing himself once more. Then, he asked questions about his society: What if things are like this? What if things are like that? How about this? I think things should be like that? It seemed like never ending. At that point, man had yearned to reach for something better. He desired to be someone.

The Greek arts celebrated human potential, the Roman arts displayed political sovereignty or power. The Romans embraced and emulated the Greek art. That is why their art looked very Greek, but something had changed. It was not idealized. Instead, the Roman arts are real portraits mostly depicting politically influential people or sculptures conveying a political message. An example is the magnificent portrait of the second Roman emperor, Tiberius.

Romans were also great engineers. They produced architecture on a grand scale and innovated the architectural structures that the Greeks had. One example is The Colosseum, a huge amphitheater with a combination of the three traditional Greek orders— Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian— and innovative arch. It reigned for centuries and showed the world how powerful the Roman empire was.

References

“Tiberius” EMORY: Michael C. Carlos Museum. Web. Accessed on 26 June 2012. <http://carlos.emory.edu/tiberius>

“Roman Art” OoCities.org. October 2009. Web. Accessed on 26 June 2012. <http://www.oocities.org/pmmcdonough/fall_rome.htm>

Matthew Collings. “This is Civilisation Ep.1.” 23 June 2008. Online video. Youtube. Accessed on 23 June 2012.

“Egyptian Languange and Writing.” Heritage Key: Unlock the Wonders. Web. Accessed on 23 June 2012. <http://heritage-key.com/egypt/egyptian-language-and-writing>