Interpretation of art or art of interpretation

What do you see? Do you think this is finished? Do you think is upside down? Or maybe sideways? Do you feel is something scary? Or is something pretty? Do you think the colours are right? What do you think the author is trying to say here?

All the answers will be delivered in time, but first let’s see inside ourselves, because every time we make a judgement about something we are using our own experiences as measure so every interpretation we give says more about ourselves than about what are we interpreting. And that is in life, when we think something is offensive is because we would use that to offend people and by the same reason we feel offended because of it, and when we feel aggression is because we would attack someone in that way and for that reason we feel aggravated there is never a objective thought on our lives everything we do, is under subjectivity and judgement,

Name: Self-portrait

Technique: Oil over canvas

Creator: Mortenius

Notes from the author: When I was in college I had to take around 4 elective classes, one of those was Paint, and during the class we learned classic oleo technique, from preparing the canvas to use the shadows and light, this was the final project, a self-portrait, you had to present it with an explanation of why you decided to paint yourself that way. The teacher wanted to know why the colors and the angle, he wasn’t counting on someone using abstraction, well this is the why of this painting.

First wasn’t because I can’t paint to save my life, that has never stopped me from doing a paint or a draw so that was not the reason.

What I thought making this painting was that everybody makes their own impressions of what they see, or read, so why limit them to a painting of my face, and they start thinking “Looks sad” or things like that, so I made my own “Rorschach stain” and presented as my portrait. The teacher never liked or even got the idea of the painting, I think. That for me was almost clever.

When I finish my painting I saw that some people look at it like something scary, others got intrigued, very few liked it, so with that response I was happy, because is the response I have as a first impression, so for me was an accurate self-portrait. I got an 80/100.

And everything in life is like that, no matter how much you think in your objectivity, everything is subjective, (Only math is objective) but that is what gives multiple solutions to a problem, or multiple problems to something that didn’t have it.

By example how a 4 year old can be a racist? Well I know they can be indoctrinated to it, but they really will not get it, so if you see a little girl with a confederate flag on her cap or a little boy in Halloween with a costume wearing “Black Face” can you see them as racist? You are the one with negative connotations trough those things, they don’t they could have seen it in cartoon or in the story and like it. I call a lot of people “Nigga” (Just people I know and consider my friends) but I don’t have that negativity around my mind. A friend told me “I know a couple of names I can call you that will make you want to fight me” Well man, I doubt it because during my life I been called all kind of stuff and never even raise an eyebrow to it, there is no way I can be called by any name and that upsets me, because I know that they are just words.

I always get amazed by how a simple word or image can make a person flip and going in a rant for hours, and how some people center their attention in a line or a piece of the image without looking at the big picture, like ending the line with the  :P means is a joke.

I always try to live by a phrase of wisdom “If we don’t use this beat because we fear of offend somebody, then we will have to go back and check all what we have done, if that offend someone and apologize, and realize that all what have we done is wrong and we will stop doing what we love, for that reason we need to do this” –Graham Chapman.

 

"If nobody feels insulted with your comedy, you are doing it wrong"

So, what do you see?