Art

There are some things in this world that I just don’t get.

For example, I don’t get a lot of what Gorgeous does on the interior decorating front. She has baskets and trinkets all around the house. I mean the stuff looks nice and I’m glad she decorates. She is much better at it than I am.

For the holidays she’ll take glass Christmas ornaments and arrange them on the shelf on a swatch of cloth with a couple strings of glass beads. It’s nice, helps make the house festive and I even like it.

But I don’t get it. And I never would have thought to do that. Left to me the ornaments would have simply would have just ended up on the tree, not the shelf.

It is an ongoing joke in our family. Gorgeous will see something, or be talking with one of her girlfriends about decorating or some such when I’m nearby. She’ll turn to me and say, “You don’t get that, do you Chris?”

Nope. I’ll have to fess up. I’m not sure if that makes me defective in some small way. Maybe I’m lacking a decorating gene or something.

Another thing I often don’t get is art.

My friend Jeremias was teasing me about bragging on Emily the other day, but not mentioning his gallery show that I went to a couple of weeks ago. (Of course now he’s going to harass me about appearing to cave, but I’ll get over it.) And it got me to thinking. Why would I brag on one friend, but not another.

Thinking about it, I realized that to be totally honest, I don’t really get much of his work. Although I do rather like the shot with the cows because, well, it has cows. And he had a really cool piece in the gallery that looked a little like someone from Star Trek beaming in which I liked because I’m into sci-fi. I bugged him until he told me how he made that effect. So now I know, which is cool too.

The rest of it looks good and all and I understand the theme behind what he had in the gallery. But I feel like I’m missing out on something.

And trying to have him explain it was frustrating for both of us. The whole effect of art is pretty much lost when it hast to be explained to some dolt like me. I imagine he feels awkward as though me not getting it somehow devalues his work. Nope. I just don’t have the art-appreciation gene either.

As long as I’m highlighting my artist friends, take a look at Josh’s work. I like his panoramas, I guess because that’s pretty much the way my eyes see the world. His photos from Iraq give a feel of what it must be like over there.

Then check out Peter’s movie. I have to confess I get movies a little more easily than painting or photography. Besides I helped Peter out on the set a couple days. If you look at photo #20, that’s me holding the reflector.

There actually is a take-away from all this.

Just because we don’t value something doesn’t mean the thing has no value.

Forgetting that gets us in trouble. On both sides of the coin. On the one side we can end up looking down on others who value different things than we do.

The other side of the coin is just as damaging. Because we may feel like we’re defective if we look for others to confirm our values. Just because they don’t share the same passions, doesn’t mean ours are necessarily misplaced.

Find some art. Enjoy it. You don’t even have to get it.

Tags: Art, Values, CREEations, Chris Cree