An Essay on Art, Connection, and Why We Change
What makes anyone more inclined at one point in their lives than at another to appreciate art? On what history must this openness to receiving into our lives what art has to teach us be built? What, in time, inspires us to actively search for expressions of other minds that will open our own?
While I’ve always appreciated the beautiful, usually I’ve found it in my external environment — in the way the sun can illuminate a canopy of leaves from above; in the first tentative, budding flowers of spring; in the elaborate elegance of old, Parisian cathedrals, coupled with their innate knowledge of the care that went into ensuring they would endure. Sometimes I’ve found it in music — in the way it can calm or create an atmosphere that allows one to be present with their humanity, or in the affinity one might feel with a composer upon recognizing a phrase from another piece. It’s only in the past year that I’ve come to think of myself as someone who appreciates the visual arts.
It started with a trip to Thomas, West Virginia, an artist’s haven where downtown is one road and every other structure is home to an art gallery. At Bloom, I purchased a print by Jacqueline Maloney, at once feminine, moonlit, and primal, and became acquainted with the work of Veronica Steiner — later, Jen Toledo — and many, many others. Having lived in several large cities in my life, I’d had the opportunity to visit dozens of museums and even noted special exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum to take my mom to, months in advance of when she visited: Orchids: Amazing Adaptations (which I thought she’d appreciate, because she likes orchids) and Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past Is Prologue (which I thought I’d appreciate, because I have a long-held interest in Vietnam). It’s worth noting that I chose these exhibitions out of curiosity about what she and I already liked, and that we therefore brought to the art our preconceived judgments through which we experienced it. There is something to be said for effortfully learning about that of which one has no prior knowledge (an example in my case being when I visited the Institut du monde arabe Tourcoing, in France). But discovering artists at Bloom and afterwards was the first time I felt adjacent to, if not part of, a community of artists, and that made all the difference.
The above serves to exemplify James Prochaska’s transtheoretical model of behavior change. According to the model, there are six stages of change: pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and termination. In moving away from the world of a dilettante and into a community of artists, how I define my identity changed, and in that process, how I relate to others changed too.
Most recently, with a few spare hours on a trip, I paid for a ticket to The Art Institute of Chicago and, for the first time I can recall, reacted to art in a way that was more spiritual than physical or emotional, like taking a deep breath or gazing in jaw-dropped awe. The exhibition was Expressive Ink, Yang Yanping’s watercolor abstractions both depicting nature and invoking the connection each of us has to it. They invite the viewer to look more closely, or sometimes from farther away, seeing what is not always apparent and inciting us to embody, through our experience of them, new perspectives of the natural world.
Instead of illuminated leaves, budding flowers, and Parisian cathedrals, she paints lotus blossoms as they wither, her characteristically dotted stems, and towering mountains and rocks. “Cloudy Summer” shows lotus stems in blue and black as they fade into winter, among watercolor shapes in shades of black through in which those who look will find faint lines and ephemeral patterns. “In Fog” looks like a towering mountain only from afar; the center nebula of “Winter Fog” appears to emit its own halo of light that forces the viewer to acknowledge hope—not for anything in particular, just, hope. Noticing, I felt connected to the art and, by extension, the artist: the art functioned as medium for a relationship to coalesce between her and me, the product of our shared understanding.
I don’t believe it is a coincidence that, as I’ve deepened my relationship to art, I’ve also sought to understand more of and about humanity, how people live in and view the world differently, and what it means to be human — all of the forgiveness, sorrows, sweetness, mistakes, misunderstandings, and good intentions that define our collective experience.
In the past several years, when I’ve made a meaningful life decision, the change happened suddenly. This is not to say that a series of smaller, more intentional life changes is not meaningful; arguably, these changes are just as if not more so. But for a long time, or so it feels like, I’ve been looking for a way to get involved in the community, or, more precisely, I’ve been thinking about looking, somewhere between the contemplation and preparation stages, in the model. (Now that I’ve moved into the action stage, it’s amusing to realize that the opportunities I’m pursuing, friends brought to my attention some time ago — I just had to be in the right place in life to see them as that.)
What changed that made me enter that state of contemplation/preparation, and then take action? I’ve a pretty good idea that what moved me from preparation to action was loneliness. The feeling came in part from a positive change: that I’d learned how to be comfortable alone with my thoughts, which many young women don’t afford themselves the chance to do, in either sense of the word (in decades past, living at home until marriage, or today, living with roommates until you find your partner — or don’t).
As for why I wanted to change in the first place, I imagine it stemmed from a desire to strengthen my ability to empathize. By definition, to “understand and share the feelings of another” requires us to be vulnerable. It’s not enough to consider what might be going on in someone else’s life that would make them act a certain way; we have to actually step into that person’s emotional world. In order to do this, to consider how their mind might work and how they might experience life, you have to let go of yourself and your world. Both can be scary, because while empathy is one of the most profound ways to develop a sense of human connection, to gain that connection, you must first experience the loss of yourself. You must choose to enter into another’s space, knowing what you find there may change who you are, even if that is to become a more kind, self-aware, and resilient person, in the end.
Art creates space for us to empathize. It is an expression of our humanity, and it helps us to be more human.
