I have an abominably bad eye for art and I never found the inner meaning that modern artists talk so much about. To me, modern art looks like a random show of color as if some 3 year old sprayed paint over a canvass. Probably for these reasons, The Sydney Mishkin Gallery is the first art gallery I ever visited in my life and if it wasn’t mandatory, I probably would never have gone there.
The only art I ever came in contact with is the drawings of the comics me and my friend created. The pictures in a comic are much more precise and the direct meaning is much more prominent than the inner meaning. When I visited the Mishkin gallery, the exhibition was on copies of Medieval Chinese paintings and they made little sense to me. If I was there alone, most pictures wouldn’t make any sense to me but being part of the group and figuring out the hidden messages in each painting became a popular sport among the group.
A friend figured out that watching a painting up close and then watching it from far back creates a different image of the painting. More revelation can be found out when one observes the painting from distance. There was a painting of a Beduin riding his horse is the desert. Honestly. the picture baffled us all as we couldn’t figure out the difference between his torso, his horse and his limbs. However, after scrutinizing it over 10 minutes and having a heated debate we came to the conclusion that the man is actually wearing a cloak which is flapping in the wind making him look like an illusion. I think the artist drew the picture in such a way to confuse viewers and later on muse over the answer they came up with.
Overall, the visit was fun. I’m not interested in art any more than I was before but the one hour I spent there with my friends was a good one, finding hidden clues in paintings and debating whose point is the more accurate (As Leanna said “I like this game”). After all, it’s still better than sitting in the library and staring blankly at the notes.
