What you Get is What you See

"Opaque" - Paola De Giovanni

This photograph by British artist Paola De Giovanni captured my attention the minute I saw it. On one level it reminded me of sitting in the back seat of the car as a child, wiping away the frost of the window with my mitten. On a technical level, I thought about photographic clarity. One of my early photography instructers had the idea that one needed to learn how to take a crisply executed photograph before getting into taking a deliberate fuzzy one.

If what artist Ildikó Kalapács recently told me in an interview is true, and I do concur with her thought, is that "art is not necessarily about whether or not you like it, but what you take away from it," then critiquing art is boiled down into some pretty basic elements and not nearly as complicated as some people want to make it.

Some art, and literature has a multi-layered effect on us. Sometimes this is deliberate by the creator, and sometimes it is a happy coincidence. But I tend to be attracted to art that I can view many times, and always come away with a little something new or different than the previous time I viewed it.

What are your thoughts?

(c) 2006 - Ruth Mitchell - all rights reserved