Expressionist art brings a connection to the spiritual world. I think that it gives credit to emotions for being the purest indicators of the soul. Emotions are real and out of our control. We can change what we know, but we can't change how we feel. The expressionist pieces we saw today don't attempt to mimic reality too closely. This makes perfect sense because reality is unsure. I do not see the same reality as the person next to me. Expressionism seems to see emotions, not reality, as our connection to each other and to art. I remember doing a STACapedia article on Munch. His paintings had an obvious emotional quality. You know exactly how it feels. The film with the man with the balloons, the operas, and the Bunto dancing each seemed to have a uniform emotional quality, as if they were projections of a single emotion.
Thinking about expressionism today brought me closer to a definition of art. I've heard that art is the language of the soul, and I believe it makes more sense to me right now than to many of the people who have said it. As a writer, language is a huge interest of mine, and I understand that language rises from necessity. The better humans communicate, the more efficient we are and the faster we have advanced. But we all have an inner world that we can never communicate with near close to perfect accuracy.
We talk about this in acting. When I see you, I don't see you how you see yourself. I see what I feel and what I know about you. But how much can I know? I was thinking- how much others know about me, THAT is how accurately I look at other people. I don't think others know anything about me, and I don't think anyone knows much about anyone. Art is like when a group of teenagers sits around and admits to each other the weird things they do when they're alone, and they feel their actions are validated. But the language we speak only gets us so far. I cannot explain to another person what my world looks like or what I look like to myself. But when they see my art, they are seeing it. The validation is in the fact that they can find some meaning in it. That is where our inner worlds connect. It is unspoken, and it is beautiful, and that is why art is important.
