Toward the end of our conversation, I sit in the living room near the small table with rocks strewn across its surface. Rose-Lynn calls out as she is making a cup of tea in her kitchen: “Awesome and awful. It’s so striking that they go together.”
We discuss the ninth-century etymology of “awe,” and how the meaning of the word has changed.
She continues.
“Awesome and awful . . . they are mine to reconcile.”
For Rose-Lynn, “art is a language, which through flashes of insight reveals the answer that exists within a question.” In art we see life patterns, for both living and dying. In that moment of reconciliation, we might consider what to make of this cycle of life and death.
Hints of Vast Mysteries
Our default minds, so focused on independence and competitive advantage, are not well suited to making sense of the vast. So guided are we by prior knowledge and our need for certainty that we avoid or explain away the mysteries of life. Visual art, though, offers us hints at understanding the vast and mysterious.
There is no better guide to this idea than philosopher Edmund Burke, born in Dublin in 1729. His thin book from 1757, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, should be mandatory reading in art, architecture, film, and design schools.
Burke’s thin volume opened eighteenth-century eyes to everyday awe. In those pages, he details how we can experience awe in all manner of perceptual experiences—thunder, shadows, patterns of light on a road, and even the sight of bulls (but not the more beautiful, affectionate cow!). The book has oddities, no doubt: Burke prioritizes the visual and auditory; according to him, scent cannot make us feel awe. (This notion offended, rightfully so, a Frenchwoman I met hiking who worked in the perfume industry.) Most critically, Burke offers ideas about how our experiences of the beautiful and the sublime differ.
For Burke, feelings of beauty arise out of a sense of familiarity and affection; awe, by contrast, arises in our recognition of what is powerful, obscure, and dreadful. Current studies in the science of aesthetics align with this distinction. Our default expectations about size, space, time, objects, other people, and causality streamline our efforts to make sense of the world. When what we encounter readily aligns with our mind’s default expectations, we feel comfort and pleasure. This has been found in studies of faces, scents, images of furniture, and everyday scenes.
In visual art, we like and prefer scenes that reflect familiar, statistical regularities of the world—the visual expectations of our default self. We like placements that seem familiar, such as putting objects in the center of a scene. We find it pleasing when things that belong in the sky, such as birds, are high up as opposed to close to the ground. We prefer horizon lines that are typical of how we look at the world, and we find horizon lines that are unusually high or low unpleasant. Visual art that captures how we typically perceive the world brings us comfort, and its companion in the realm of aesthetic emotion, the feeling of beauty.
For visual art to stir awe, Burke continues, it must suggest vast mystery. One pathway is to hint at expansive causal forces. Perceived profusion—carvings on the facade of a church, a long line of trees in a garden, gravestones in a military cemetery—hints at the deep forces that organize our social and natural lives. As one example, Camille Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre buzzes with a profusion of pedestrians, streetlights, and cafés, hinting at the transformative cultural energy of Paris in the late nineteenth century.
Simple repetition, Burke observes, is suggestive of vast causal forces that manifest in repeating forms. Images of waves, or mountains, for example, hint at large, unifying forces—the tides of the ocean or the geological evolution of the Earth. Swedish filmmaker Mikel Cee Karlsson relies on extended repetitions of everyday acts—brushing teeth, stroking a partner’s hair, leg jiggles, nervous tics—to emphasize the conventions that organize the patterns of our social lives.
For Burke, patterns of light and movement can focus our minds. When scenes in art are unified by light (as in Rembrandt’s paintings), sensed motion (Monet’s flags in Rue Montorgueil with Flags), or a pervasive hue (Picasso’s Blue Period), we infer that there is something vast that joins together the objects in the image.
And visual art can stir awe through subverting our default expectations about time, as in the use of slow motion in film (think Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull). And space: Vincent van Gogh’s Almond Blossoms has no horizon or perspective; the thin branches seem to extend beyond the edge of the painting, producing a vertiginous, disorienting effect. He painted it for his nephew, newly arrived to the world. The painting seemed “to enthrall” the younger Vincent, as reported by his mother, Van Gogh’s sister-in-law, Joanna.
As Iris Murdoch suggested, visual art helps us transcend the status quo expectations and ordinary way of perceiving our lives through the lens of the default self. Instead, through hints at vastness and mystery, art enables us to see the deeper structures to life around us, and grounds us within these interconnected patterns.
Direct Perception
It has long been thought that visual art enables new “possibilities of feeling,” allowing us to perceive the world directly through the lenses of emotions. Seeing twentieth-century German artist Käthe Kollwitz’s portrayals of grief—she lost two of her children at young ages—opens our eyes to what the world looks like during experiences of loss. Jim Goldberg’s photographs in Rich and Poor make us see the life-is-on-the-line, raw tenderness of living in poverty. Rothko’s paintings can evoke the thought patterns of deep depression that led him to suicide at age sixty-six.
For Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, a point of visual art is to evoke mystical feeling and “preserve the soul” through such “Stimmung,” or mood:
[In great art] the spectator does feel a corresponding thrill in himself. . . . Indeed the Stimmung of a picture can deepen and purify that of the spectator. Such works of art at least preserve the soul from coarseness; they “key it up,” so to speak, to a certain height, as a tuning-key the strings of a musical instrument.
Visual art fine-tunes our experience of awe. Rest your eyes on a Huichol string painting from Mexico and you may sense you are hallucinating. South African artist Ernest Mancoba’s paintings of spiritual experience are suffused with the bright, otherworldly light of mystical awe and interconnectedness of forms. Berlin’s omnipresent street art—portrayals of ecstatic dancers or odd, dreamlike beings—may lead you to see the city through the lens of awe. Psychedelic artists like Alex Grey have sought to capture what it is like to see the world in a mystical moment on psychedelics. Art is a door of perception and can function as a lens of awe.
Street art seen on an awe walk I took in Berlin
How visual art leads to the direct perception of awe inspired Rebecca Stone to forty years of study of Mesoamerican art. She has published papers on Andean textiles, Mexican tomb sculptures, carvings on Incan agricultural devices, Ecuadorian petroglyphs, and the architecture of the Wari Empire (from 600 to 1100 AD in central Peru). She synthesizes these discoveries in her book The Jaguar Within (in Mesoamerican traditions, the jaguar is a sacred animal).