Is art available at its undoubted value?
How to learn to perceive art?
I want to talk about this.
In the 1990s Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy wrote an essay “What is art?”
and comes to the conclusion of extreme importance
openness of art to the broad masses of people.
He corresponded with Stasov, his friend, an art critic.
From Stasov’s letter:
“How many people who are clever, speak well about art.
But put this man in front of the picture, he does not connect two words. “
It’s about the inability to perceive a particular work.
Without any doubt, knowledge of history and culture is important for understanding art.
But that’s not all!
You can perfectly know the history of Florence,
biography Cosimo Medici, read Machiavelli,
remember by heart the whole pieces of Giorgio Vasari
“Biographies of Italian artists.”
But this is not enough!
The artistic image is concrete, in a concrete work –
this is the meaning of art.
And when you stand in front of the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence,
Here and now,
something must blow your heart and turn your soul.
The skill of perception expands our consciousness,
our experience of feelings, it changes human qualities.
A person becomes multidimensional, and he develops empathy –
to perceive and understand another, to join the feelings of another.
After all, every time he faces a new work –
it is different, unique and never met.
And he hones this feeling of empathy.
Perception of the artistic image develops creative abilities.
There are many problems in the world that require non-standard approaches,
require creativity, the world needs creative people.
Art is very important for every person.
In modern society, the opinion has been established that art is closed,
art is elitist.
But after all, art is a product of humanity.
It is initially open to any person.
You have to learn to perceive art.
Learn exactly how we learn to write.
How to learn and how to teach to perceive art?
I had to answer these questions,
when after graduating from university and defending the thesis began to teach.
My students were fascinated with the facts of history and culture.
They could list all the elements of the architectural warrant:
architrave, frieze, cornice, entablement.
But they were lost before a particular work,
the meaning of the image eluded them.
The artistic image in art always arises
as a result of emotional shock.
The artist is experiencing a vivid feeling.
This feeling does not let him go long,
and he wants to share this feeling with other people.
And then he is looking for means of expressiveness.
In each art they have their own:
in music it’s sound, it’s rhythm, in dance it’s the plasticity of the body.
In the visual arts and in general in visual arts –
this line, color spots, textures, proportions.
Feelings can indeed be expressed.
For example, a feeling of tenderness and a sense of passion.
A feeling of tenderness
expressed in light colors, light:
pinkish-salmon, bluish, grassy-green.
In these tones, there must necessarily be some kind of understatement,
because in the gesture of tenderness there is an understatement,
there is even a hint of timidity.
But passion is completely different.
Contrasts: hot and cold tones collide.
Dark space is broken by flashes of shining lightning.
The blood is boiling.
You can express the feeling, but the fact is that in art
feeling is expressed not by one means of expressiveness,
and a complex of means – structure,
in which all means of expressiveness are tied into an organic knot.
I understood perfectly well that you need to learn to see the features,
The difference between individual means of expressiveness and between structures.
I knew how to teach this.
It was necessary to work out, sharpen the vigilance of the eye
and form the eye of the artist. To teach to see.
Five shades of blue – to teach to see the difference.
Different structures – to teach to see the difference.
Comparison is a way out.
But for perception it was extremely important to feel.
How to teach how to feel,
that the line is not only fractional, but it is nervous,
the line is not only one-piece,
but is it peaceful or calm?
How to teach how to feel? I did not know.
I did not know how to teach how to feel.
And then I asked myself: how do you get it?
And this was a discovery – I realized what I was doing thanks to the body.
When I stand before the icon of Andrei Rublev,
golden-honey tones
immediately remove all the clamps in the body.
I breathe easily,
and a sense of peace and even security is immersed in my soul.
But I should remember Picasso’s Guernica, how everything contracts,
muscles are extremely strained, breathing is interrupted,
and a sense of fear and terror settles inside of me,
the feeling that Picasso wanted to convey to us.
So my method was formed,
which I called “the method of deep perception.”
What are the most important skills?
The first is the ability to see and snap out structures.
Do not just see individual visual features,
but structural patterns.
And in this my method approaches the views of Rudolf Arnheim.
But if Rudolf Arnheim believed that the eye plays the main role in perception,
then the experience of my pedagogical activity,
that perception is a multifaceted process, the whole person and his body participate in it.
And here I was faced with great difficulties and difficulties.
Whenever a new group of students comes to me,
we suffer for half a year, we revitalize the body:
bodies are static, bodies are cold,
terrible to say, sometimes the bodies are dead.
And it’s very difficult.
When a person lives in his dead body, he lives with a closed ego.
He does not go beyond the boundaries of the ego.
And he does not perceive not only art, but also the world around him.
He reacts, but does not perceive.
And then these aggressive judgments appear:
“And I so see!”, “And I love it!”,
“And I do not like it.” “I do not like Kandinsky.”
“I do not like many paintings by Natalia Goncharova!”
“Of course, I do not like the mature Picasso, but Dali, of course, I do not like.”
Yes, I forgot!
“I do not like Rubens, I do not like him with these magnificent ladies.
I do not like him”.
But you should ask yourself: maybe you do not know how?
Maybe you need to learn to see and try to find out,
what is it, the same Rubens?
If you try to do this,
the history of art unexpectedly opens before us
not only as a collection of historical and cultural facts,
semantic meanings, iconographic subjects,
but as a history of feeling!
A history of feeling.
There was also a very important discovery:
deep perception developed creative abilities.
After classes, my listeners approached me
and they said that their lives were changing.
It was amazing, but at the same time it was natural,
because perception is the reverse side of the birth of the image!
The artist experiences a vivid feeling and embodies it in the structure,
and the spectator stands in front of the canvas,
he must snatch the structure with his eye, respond with the body
and give birth in the body is the feeling that inspired the artist.
In fact, when we perceive, we create anew an image.
And we have the same creative abilities,
which must be the artist.
The ancient Japanese have an interesting statement about the nature of creativity.
They say this:
“When the artist’s soul is filled to the brim with impressions,
what is poured out over the edge of the soul,
and is a work of art. “
A filled soul is an indispensable condition for the birth of an image.
But a full soul is an indispensable condition of perception,
depth perception of the image.
And if you live within the ego, behind a huge fence,
the whole world is hostile to you, you do not know it.
You are afraid of him and you are defending him.
But art teaches you to go beyond the ego,
perceive another, try to understand another.
And then another person, with a different character,
other education, other education, customs, traditions, culture,
becomes available to you.
And at some point you suddenly feel that he is your relative,
you love him, another, someone else’s from the beginning,
But he is here in your heart.
How important it is in our world, where there are so many wars and conflicts,
where there is an atomic weapon.
How important it is for us, for women, because we constantly think about children.
Art teaches us to be a man, a mature, responsible person,
a man of creativity, a man who knows the world and loves the world.
Art is waiting for you. Start now!
(Applause)
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