All Great Art Comes From a Sense of Outrage

I was in Victoria this week and found that I wrapped up business a little early. I called the hotel, but at that point my suite wasn't ready yet. I decided to park the car for a while and go for a stroll. There are many great little galleries around Victoria so I decided to take in as many as I could.

I have always thought highly of the arts. Not just paintings, everything. Photos, statues, writing, poetry, lyrics, singing, architecture, film, acting, and so on. Art to me shows what the human is truly capable of, I don't care what our cellphones are capable of, I don't care if my refrigerator has a TV on it, I want to see how high the imagination can fly. If it wasn't for our imaginations, if it wasn't for art, we wouldn't have many of the modern conveniences we have today. We also wouldn't have that song that can take us back so briefly to a moment, or a movie that can hit so close to home it can have a grown man cry uncontrollably.


The funny thing with art, is that its greatest forms normally come from some sense of outrage. Art really took a modern form during the High Renaissance/Baroque period, take the masters like Michelangelo, or Bernini. Both men were known to create art not just out of a sense of outrage from within, but also something so controversial it would create outrage in others as well. When pressured by the Pope to complete the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (Sixteenth Chapel according to most of my friends) , Michelangelo painted the Pope's face onto the image of the devil on the ceiling. As for Bernini...well let's just say his Ecstasy of Beata Ludovica is less than angelic.



Let's take one of Canada's own, Yousuf Karsh, one of the greatest photographers the world has ever known. When faced with a tough subject, in this case Winston Churchill, Karsh had to battle one of the strongest of wills. Churchill as always would not surrender his cigar, Karsh didn't want the cigar in the photo and grew increasingly frustrated. In what would soon be a shared sense of outrage he walked over to Churchill hiding the remote for his camera in his palm. He ripped the cigar out of Churchill's hand and walked back toward his camera snapping the photo while Churchill wasn't expecting it. It caught Churchill's personal moment of outrage and also captured one of the finest portraits ever taken.

The thing with outrage is that it takes us to a place, a place we can normally only find in a loved ones arms. It makes us vulnerable. It makes us speak in tongues. We are truthful when in outrage, but it is like it knocks the faucet off of our emotional tap, it all comes out uncontrollably like a waterfall from our mouths, or our pens, our cameras, or our paintbrushes. It leaves us standing there naked in the wilderness, and it's beautiful.

There is so much art in the world, and so much of it passes us by. Like I always talk about at Christmas of my long walk looking at the twinkling lights and wondering what all of the families are doing inside their homes. Take a walk down your street this weekend, look at all the houses on your street.They are full of so many stories, so many triumphs and tragedies. And all we ever see in the end are yards and driveways.



And of course Dali blows my entire theory.