This post is not about visual art understanding. It's about its daily impact on your mind, energy level, behavior.
Usually a question "would you hang it in your living room?" is considered banal and not intelligent, because art is more than a primitive decoration, right? But not everybody understands the difference between an art as a philosophic category, and an art as a decoration of a living space.
Sometimes people use art in their home with the purpose of making a statement about themselves. That statement directed to others, who will be visiting the house and getting the certain impression about person who lives there. Sometimes people pretend to be more sophisticated that they really are, or want to build some image in the eyes of their guests. So, they choose the art which carries some specific message, working for image development. That's perfectly understandable and acceptable.
However, while you choose art for your home (or any other space, where you will be spending significant amount of your time) with any goal considered - your image representation, simple color coordination, or any other - you should never forget about how the art on your walls influences you.
Let's talk about what art is doing to us. It is pretty simple with traditional representational art which deals with specific recognizable objects and usually carries straightforward, clearly understandable messages.
Things are getting more complicated with the abstract art, which usually appeals directly to your subconscious mind. The purpose of non-representational art is to produce feelings in the observer, bypassing literal perception and going straight to emotion, when all your brain energy goes to this process. And here lies its power over our mind.
As we know, our subconscious mind acts and reacts according to the stimulus it receives, whether you recognize it or not. Thus if you have powerful abstract art piece in your living room, which you appreciate very much due to that fact, that you can relate with the feelings it produces, you understand the power of it and the message - but if you feel it's not positive, if it seems either sad, or provocative in the negative way - it will affect your mind negatively every time when your eyes will be glazing over, even if you don’t think about it at all. It will cause your subconscious mind to feel the sadness and/or other negative emotions day by day, year by year, programming your mind, your behavior, your cognition. The power within our subconscious mind is much bigger than the majority of people understand. Correspondingly, the art, which causes good, positive feelings will program your mind and behavior positively, making your life happier, more positive, and balanced.
The subconscious mind is a major component of our behavior. This is where the most subtle things we take in either visually or audibly affect one's whole conscious being. We should be very careful of the things we let in. It is sometimes difficult to do, but we should try hard. It just takes some filtering and discipline.
So the bottom line - one should be very careful and attentive to his subtle feelings while choosing the art for the surrounding walls. By getting it, you will let it enter your mind and your life - don’t underestimate its power over you.
(image: Wassily Kandinsky -Painting with Red Spot, 1914)
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