One
day I was talking to an art student and she told me, “art
is all about perception.”
That’s very true and direct. Art is communion
of one soul to another, offered through a symbolic language of form and content.
According
to the perennial
philosophy (http://www.religiousworlds.com/text/prenphil.html), the human
beings possess at least three modes of knowing:
The eye of flesh
The eye of mind
The eye of contemplation
The
eye of flesh discloses the material, concrete, and sensual world; the eye of
mind discloses the symbolic, conceptual, and linguistic world; and the eye of
contemplation discloses the spiritual, transcendental, and transpersonal world.
These are not three different worlds, but three different aspects of our one
world disclosed by different modes of perception.
Art
is psychological perception of reality and creation. It can be reduced to a
perception of a subject of a constructed visual stimulus. It can also be
predictable in regards to probable response of its intended target spectators.
Art is an experience based upon interrelationship between people and their
world. Art includes such relationships as between viewer and art object, artist
and viewer, society and artist, and the unconscious and the conscious. Thus, as
artists envision a sense of wholeness that the human mind provides to the static
and isolated nature of real world stimuli, they recreate delicacy and beauty
that capture this sense of unity among the apparently disparate things or events
of our environment.
Art
exists in the minds of its selected perceivers. Some of these psychological
factors influencing the perception of art include culture, sex, age, individual
perspective, and value systems. Besides these variables of aesthetic, perception
are biological components like the way our consciousness functions, as an end
product of evolution. Art thus includes the perceptual cognitive factors of the
unconscious and psychophysical sensory mechanisms of the human body. The
abstract beauty and depth within a good Chinese calligraphy work can be
perceived universally regardless the differences in race, culture, languages, and
time.
Like
the scientists, the artists search to discover a new reality through
accomplished means of extending the limitation of today's reality. Science does
this through advancing technology whereas artists use their “perception” to
expand creative awareness of their contemporaries and predecessors. A good
Chinese calligrapher bears a mission to explore new possibilities and reality to
represent the intrinsic beauty of Chinese characters and the utmost beauty of
one's inner heart transformation.
If an artist lacks insight and perception, his practice will be in vain for life because there is no guidance and enlightenment.