It's interesting...

Thank you Ellen. I was surprised and flattered when I read your comment. I think seminary teachers, as a whole, are the cream of the crop. Mine had a profound impact on my life.


Let's talk about cubism.

Cubism is under appreciated and profound, in my eyes. Perhaps a lot of people dislike it because it's hard to understand what the artist is communicating. This is an interesting concept - if everyone stopped learning about something because they don't understand at first, then we would still be hunters and gatherers.
What the artist communicates is different to each and every person. That's part of the artistic appeal. When cubism first made it's debut on the art world, Rudyard Kipling said, "It's interesting, but is it art?" Perhaps this is where we ventured into a world where art is in the eye of the beholder.

It's almost cliché that I would use Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. But I like Duchamp, and this painting does more for me than the Mona Lisa. I actually don't like the Mona Lisa, and can really only admire it for its virtuosity in the renaissance style. Picasso's Guernica would probably have been even more cliché, but it's a sad painting, and I like to be happy, so we're sticking with the light-hearted.

Have you ever wondered how art followed the progression of science? Or was it science that followed the progression of art? We had neo-classical in the Enlightenment - when they were establishing the very fundamentals of most sciences as we know them today. Impressionism with the great confusion and hoopla over electricity and magnetism. I can see E&M in impressionism - crossing current lines, blurring lines between one object or particle and another. And finally, the most exciting - cubism with the great and dreadful QUANTUM THEORY. I love quantum. Best physics class I ever took.

When scientists started understanding (well, "understanding") quantum mechanics, it was chaos. The concepts are so bizarre, so different, so COOL, that many physicists could not and would not accept it. Sound familiar? Picasso once stated that in some of his paintings, he was trying to represent how the fourth dimension looked.

Hold the phone. Does that strike anyone else like it does me?

Take for instance, The Three Musicians. Here is Picasso, painting a 3D scene, on a 2D canvas. Now, look closer a the picture. For the most part, he's using 1D - straight lines. And he's trying to represent the 4th Dimension? Really?

Awesome, Picasso. Awesome.

Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view. - Jacques Lipchitz