Personal: A discovery of the joy of the visual arts.

Something has awakened in me. The last months have seen the rise of an internal paradigm for the visual arts. It has been a wonderful, gradual journey. I've in a way always been interested in art for a long time. But maybe I developed slowly.

In high school I spent a lot of time looking at amateur drawings. They were just complicated enough for me, that I could with some certainty appreciate their worth as art. After a while of this I could spot good or bad composition through the thumbnails. But none of the amateur paintings conveyed any real sense of emotion.


As I got older, I didn't really learn anything new about art, but I did spent a lot of time collecting experiences. They were philosophical ideas, games, acts of love of contempt, times of sorrow or even (ghasp!) education.

Then just this last year, something has been happening. I suddenly followed and art blog regularly. I spent time seeking out museums and galleries. I picked up a design blog here, a fashion blog there -  suddenly a new sense of direction dawned in me. I had developed preferences.


There were traces before, I know that now. But suddenly I would like something, and then later find out that it conformed to prior views. I started thinking about photography, fashion, movies, videogames, industrial design, everything from an aesthetic point of view. Not solely, of course. My newfound aesthetic eye became a life enriching atribute to my mind. 

The moleskine notebook is a design staple in our western paradigm.

I will write more about complexity and simplicity in the arts later; but to put things shortly, the world is extremely dense in information. It is just amazingly complex  - and yet we manage to make sense of most of it. So it is with art. If you are presented with something completely and utterly new, your inexperience will cloud up the picture so bad, that you won't be able even to appreciate the simple ideas of it. They are lost.

The real time you don't see the forest for trees, is when you are unable to recognise and put a name to the trees. They simply become a tree. Our urban worlds are filled with, what to many of us are, unnamed trees.


In biological terms I have now identified the importan geni, and are now sampling species. In more specific and cultural terms, I've now found modernism, scandinavian design, swiss design, art deco and jugendstyle; and now I'm sampling Gaudi, Picasso, Fumito Ueda, Arne Jacobsen, helvetica, and more.

It's going to be a fun experience to live and learn about the beauty we humans have managed to create for ourselves. And who knows, maybe I one day get the honour of partaking in that discourse.