What is a painting?

Pioneer books is tucked between a pawn shop and a nail salon on center street in Provo, Utah. It's an absolute treasure cove. Non-fiction on the first floor, fiction upstairs. The floors are cement and cold, but the books are old, musky, and warm. I made my way upstairs and the "art" sign caught my eye. I'm obsessing, slightly, but an old friend once told me that when you're interested in something, you can't keep away from the information, resources, or ideas.

So here's this meager art section, filled with old worn books, and random nondescript covers. I pick up a couple and read for a while, until I decide I’m not interested in reading surveys of artists. So I keep looking. Soon I find, on the bottom shelf, copies of “The Metropolitan Seminars in Art,” written by the famed art critic John Canaday. 

The 1957 president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Axel G. Rosin, wrote that the aim of these series was, “to make available in the home comprehensive instruction in art appreciation for the many thousands of persons who cannot personally attend a comparable series of museum lectures or take a good art appreciation course at a university.”

I have access to an art appreciation course, and a world-class institution, but this is so much cooler. Inside the cover is a folder with high quality color prints of the paintings covered inside that lesson. There are on average 25 pages, so they don’t take very long to cover.

The first line of the first folio, “What is a painting?” is rather unromantic. “A painting is a layer of pigments applied to a surface.” Hmm.. He goes on, “It is an arrangement of shapes and colors. It is a projection of the personality of the man who painted it, a statement of the philosophy of the age that produced it, and it can have a meaning beyond anything concerned with one man or only one period of time.”

That’s it folks, that’s all a painting is: pigment, shapes, lines.

Yet a painting is nothing without emotion, feeling, and passion. There is a misconception that an artist’s creation gushes forth from his soul, and he’s carried away like a man feeling the spirit at a revival. But that simply doesn’t happen, and if it does it cannot be considered art. The romantics appeal primarily to the emotions and the classical painters appeal  primarily to the intellect. Yet both depict or evoke a truth.

What is a painting? That's up to you.

Love \\ Christelle