Exploring The Shift
The shift is not a thing. It is the action of discovering Self.

As long as I can remember, I have been weary of interpretations of art and literature. This basically goes back to school where we were supposed to take apart great works in both art forms and come up with interpretations and meanings for details in them.

Yesterday I was reading a book about the Spanish painter Diego Velaszquez. Luckily it did focus more on the background of his life and the historical times and circumstance when the work was created, but with some of his paintings, especially the one above called Las Meninas, the author mentioned the vast differences in trying to interpret the work. You can get a glimpse of that in Wikipedia's description of the picture, when it comes to the question if the two people seen on the back wall are a fading painting or an image in a mirror.

I have written one published book myself and I started painting last year and with I was lucky enough to hear of people sharing their thoughts and impressions about the story and the paintings. None of the people were art ciritiques, just people I know or who contacted me and told me about their thoughts. All I can say, that none ever had anything to do what I had in mind when I created the works, but I see these impressions and ideas as an act of creativity in itself.

A few days ago I read a definition of what art is by a painter who said, that art should evoke feelings and stimulate thought. I am also weary of definitions of what art is or what it is not and I would certainly not call myself an artist because of the huge bag of beliefs which comes with this word, but I like this particular idea about art. I certainly enjoyed hearing people's ideas about what I created and also liked the fact that they had some reaction to it at all, even it had nothing to do with what I might or might not have intended.

Especially because in many cases my own motivation is quite simple. For example in abstract painting often the only reason for doing something is that I like the looks of it … end of story. I may see something in them, but this often occurs to me later when it is finished, and is no more or less valid than what anybody else may find. It is still entertaining to compare notes, but I do not believe in the idea of arriving at a generally valid conclusion. I understand this to an even greater degree, since recently Elias announced the wave of perception.

Today I found an article on Wikipedia about Picasso's Guernica. It is also a quite famous painting and it has been widely been interpreted (especially the meaning of the bull and horse in the painting, see the article link above). But unlike Velazquez, Picasso was still alive when he was interpreted, so he could share his own thoughts. The article states that when pressed to explain the animals in Guernica, Picasso said:

"…this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse… If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.

There is nothing much I could add to that.