Art is a revealer of truth in our world

When you study art, you study the visual world around you. You see it for what it is and isn’t. Many people see science and math as revealers of our world, and while this is true, this is not the whole truth; it is but a facet in the gem we know as our contemporary truth. We are presently so engrossed with the ideas of math and science because they bring on technological inventions which initiate wealth.

On the other side of this gem we call knowledge are the observers of this world. They help explain science and math through a visual means and we see waves, grids and ripples in time and energy. These artists give us a way to help explain our existence in a visual way which opens up new possibilities and patterns of thinking. The genetic code is just a theory wrapped around lots of words that mean very little until they were able to give the code a visual explanation of how it all fits together.

We are so busy trying to separate science, math and art that we become confused and perplexed. One field of study helps to explain the other. To try to isolate them from each other is foolishness and to separate them, well, is just plain unscientific. Even our computers tell us this by how they now work. Take away the screen and you are left eyeless and possibly clueless as to what is reality and what is not.

The attempt to isolate its scientific usefulness has resulted in art being labeled as a craft, a hobby, something outside the realm of the real world. Of course, this is foolishness. Without the visual arts, how would we really explain things, maybe by adding an extra 100,000 words to every teaching concept. It would be like taking away light, then how many things would we see in the darkness?

As a commercial artist and designer, I spent almost 40 years taking ideas out of a client’s head and putting them on paper so the idea could become reality. We need these visual translators to reach into the minds of our scientists and mathematicians and bring their ideas to visual and saleable existence.

It takes a lot of verbal communication to correctly pick an image out of another person’s mind and make it a visual reality.

Harry Croghan is an artist, photographer, writer and teacher. You can send comments to croghan@dragonbbs.com or call (740) 852-4906.