That is not a rhetorical question. A year ago I wrote about being part of a mass happiness experience (watching a circus act). A few days ago I got to experience vicarious bliss at the Impressionist exhibition at Te Papa. As well as making me intensely happy, it made me think about the nature of happiness again. I wonder if there is a pattern here somewhere?
I did realise, in a moment of clarity, through the blissed out peace, love and nature, totally non-chemically-induced fog, that Maslow would have described it as a peak state. The thing is though, I didn’t do the painting.
It wasn’t even just that I was looking at pretty pictures. In fact, the paintings were nowhere near as pretty as they look in pictures. From a distance they look like their familiar reproductions. Mothers and children in a garden, haystacks, a valley, the sea. Up close, they are living brushstrokes of wild colours, not realistic but more real to the mind than a photo. More real because they express the experience of the artist as he painted that place in that moment ( of course, it wasn’t the experience of one moment in time, Monet just waited for a similar moment to recur so he could continue work on the painting). I guess that does explain why the paintings seem so real, it was the reality of the painter’s experience, not external reality.
Hmm, maybe it is that I was experiencing the painter’s creativity in the same way we shared the acrobats freedom from gravity. Maybe, even though I have never created wonderful paintings, I have experienced the same joy in nature as Monet so his experience can also be mine, and his peak state can be mine too. I understand a little better now why some people spend fortunes on art.
I could have stayed at the exhibition forever but i knew I didn’t need to. I have seen the shadows passing over the hills and the light on the valley and it makes me happy that Monet thought it important that others saw it too.
