Guest Blogger: IAM Intern Thomas Alberti

(Christy) International Arts Movement has been incredibly blessed by the interns who have volunteered their time to work for the movement. I recently discovered that our summer intern, Tom Alberti of Grove City College, is a gifted and thoughtful writer, so I asked him to write about his experiences viewing art during his summer in Manhattan. Here are some of his musings.

A Psychological Painting

By Thomas Alberti

Jackson Pollock

One: Number 31, 1950

Black… The black lines seem to anchor the painting, somehow…

Chaos? Disorder? Patterns…

Wild, motion, energy

GRIPPING

What is there, and what do I feel?

Background—tan canvas, relatively defined border; in the back there are teal, gray, and light brown blotches and blobs. And I can see the negative spaces filled with the canvas. Then there are the white and black arcs, tendrils, and streaming flares.

It’s strange… the actual paint on the canvas—it was applied with force. The paint was moving. It had momentum and velocity—then it hit; it impacted and impressed the canvas. The canvas pushed back against the substance and then from physics on to chemistry as the paint adhered to the canvas. Now, what was once moving remains fastened to a canvas, which itself hangs from a museum wall. And I think what’s most strange, after some contemplation, about this painting is that it is of motion, of energy, and yet it is immobile, firmly secured within a placid rectangle upon a white wall within the hushed whispers of a museum. As I look at it, it begs me to use verbs for its description, but every time I inspect the painting to find just the right word, it seems to have moved again. And so, it resists my attempts at description; it defies my mind’s efforts to categorize its lines and shapes and to recognize its patterns. Moreover, there’s just a lot to look at. Dots and squiggles are small and abundant, the lines sprawl and multiply, and the little area left unpainted has its own shape and form, which leaves no area of the canvas without information. And because there’s so much to look at, the eye naturally tries to take it all in, and combined with the motion-stability tension, this creates something of a system overload for my brain.

The painting draws me in, and I like that preposition, “in.” I find it especially apt for the effect the painting has upon me because there’s a lot of space within the painting. It’s like a labyrinth. There are many layers, many doorways looking in on windows looking in on frames. There are many turns and junctures, lines behind globs, weaving in and out, tangling and roving. And it’s more of a space for the mind than an exercise for the eyes. Those black lines—I’ve finally figured out how they anchor the painting. On one hand, they’re dark enough and thick enough to give the painting structure, a skeleton. But on another, they tether the painting to my mind. Those black lines, they reach into my mind. I can almost feel them coiling about my brain, and they hold it, they seize it. I have a sensation of them expanding through my body, starting from my heart extending throughout like my circulatory system with all its veins and arteries and capillaries. Or like my nervous system. I find myself wanting to move my body in imitation of the paint; I feel actual physical urges of dance and contortion.

Unlike the last two paintings I saw, Pollock's induced within me particular, distinct sensations. They were not familiar. Sometimes when I look at the sky I feel something swell inside me, like a feeling of inspiration. And I remember the first time I saw a Rothko painting—I was on a field trip to the National Gallery of Art in DC. The painting was so big; I had never seen one as large. And it had a kind of dampening effect on me. I felt kind of sobered and deflated, and yet awestruck.

But today, I felt new feelings. And so my thoughts are brought to the topic of emotion. What is the relationship between art and emotion? Some say that the very purpose of art is to evoke emotion. Others turn this around and say that art is an expression of emotion. Still others would say that the two do not necessarily relate. My inquiry again lies along the same lines as in my last entry. If I feel nothing after looking at a work, does that mean that it’s not art? Is its value a function of my feelings? Or is the artist who plays our heartstrings second-rate, compromising the so called highroad for pathos, for mere reaction and spectacle?

As soon I began to look at Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950, trying to look and see, I realized that my feelings were right there in the midst of my looking and seeing. And so I had to make an effort not to understand the painting in terms of my feelings, but to be sure that I was, in fact, looking at what was actually there. And this became increasingly difficult as the complexity of the image overwhelmed me. I would like to describe this painting as psychological, since it got into my head so much, and we describe some movies as psychological, so I don’t think it a stretch to label a painting as such. And if this painting is psychological, then it’s no wonder that it, and also Rothko’s, were so tied with my emotions. But then again, I didn't feel emotions per se, like anger or sadness, but rather feelings, psychologicial impressions. In any case, how or why they captivated me mentally so much more than did Ugolino and other works of art, I do not know, but I hesitate to separate my feelings from the paintings nonetheless, even if the cause of that hesitation is itself a feeling. Looking at One: Number 31 1950 effected so many real and  palpable feelings. It seemed to have an intrinsic relationship with my mind, with the psyche and the subconscious, and so to isolate those aspects from the actual lines and colors makes me think of splitting the atom—very possible, and potentially profitable, but not without risk.