Depth

Over the weekend I was talking to P who like Paula Abdul in American Idol tries to find something good to say about everyone's paintings. She was enchanted by a certain watercolourist’s work much to my annoyance. The certain watercolourist’s work is superficial, I declared. It lacks depth!

What is depth? asked P

I found the meaning that Dictionary reference.com gives for depth in relation to art:

depth  (dɛpθ): intensity or profundity of emotion or feeling

Still, in spite of the nice technical definition of depth, I’d like to think ‘depth’ is something which is better experienced than described. The art needs to have a certain amount of darkness in it to bring out its beauty.

Here are three works of art which for me are the very essence of depth:

*  Vladimir Horowitz playing Traumerei in the video posted above
Or anything played by Horowitz for that matter.

* OdilonRedon’s Shell in Musee d’Orsay in Paris < click here >
We often forget that what we see on our screens is but a pale shadow of the actual picture itself.
In real life Redon’s work sparkles like a jewel.

*  Jean Giono’s small story The Man Who Planted Trees < click here>
What can I say except read it.

These days we are bombarded every single minute by hundreds of thousands of images hurtling towards us. Thanks to the blog world the amount of art we see is so plentiful that for me it becomes a blur. I space out. I have to confess that the more I see, the less I like. I keep going back instead to my three eternal favourites. And I regain my equilibrium once more.

“The outward work
will never be puny
if the inward work
is great.
And the outward work
can never be great or even good
if the inward one is puny or of little worth.
The inward work invariably
includes in itself
all expansiveness,
all breadth,
all length,
all depth.
Such a work
receives and draws all its being
from nowhere else except
from and in the heart of God.”

- Meister Eckhart 


I know there are Latvians, Ukraines and Finns silently looking at my blog. Hi there!