Communication and Art

Over lockdown I deleted all my social media sites, but later decided to come back and this time use them in a more focused way. I found someone who helped educate artists how to reach their audience. She advised me to write some more on Gia and my later interest in the female form in fashion and advertising. Later that night I was thinking about this while out with my friends and wrote a long blog post which I never posted.

I never posted it because it simply wasn’t true. I wasn’t thinking of all those things when creating something as intuitive as art, as much as I wouldn’t mind someone seeing my eastern block culture or experiences as a woman being of relevance.

Later I was talking to an artist friend on Twitter who despite being a very accomplished artist never wrote more about his work than the following sentence: “Jason May is a self-taught artist living and working in …..”

Today I was listening to a podcast by my Spanish classmate which really helped me verbalise the frustration artists feel when being asked to tell people what to see in their work. Her site is called My Pink Bananas and everyone’s immediate question is: “why bananas?” At first, she would invent meanings, but the real answer is simply “because”.

Karina talks in her podcast about miscommunication particularly of the verbal type. We often misread the other person’s intentions based on our own subjective experiences. The CSJ movement, which (thank God) hasn’t really arrived in Poland, encourages us to misunderstand each other in this way which is particularly what I don’t like about it. This however, is something we have all been guilty of even before this influence.

Art existed long before written language and is a much more effective method of communication than anything ever written about it. Perhaps this is why I’m drawn to it because I’m definitely often guilty of miscommunication and either misreading my intentions or having mine misread. The truth is my art, like for most artists, is intuitive, there is no clear intention behind it, simply to express. Express and communicate in a more effective way than words.
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Links:
Jason May

My Pink Bananas