Answer #44 - Art. It's what's for dinner.

I was at Won Sook Kim's house last night.  She's a friend.  She's a painter - the kind of painter that creates a wormhole in space, of sorts, directly to some other universe.  I'll be honest, I just can't stand 'artspeak', and I'm not good at it, so screw it, it's a wormhole, and if that means transcendence, then fine, it's transcendent.  But I can't adequately discuss her brush strokes or the character of the light... I only know that I disappear into her canvases and her world while I'm there, and when I leave, I'm incrementally better than I was when I arrived.

I'm not the first writer to be inspired by her work.  She's got books of poetry on the shelves inspired by her paintings, utlizing her paintings as illustration, etc.



She herself was influenced in a series of paintings by Composer Robert Schumann's Waldszenen (Forest Scenes), which then inspired the piano performance of the work by her sister, soloist Won Mi Kim.



And, of course, she's inspired me - more than once, but most recently in a choral piece for 6 women, based on and titled after a relief sculpture she did called Bending Tree. I'll put it on-line someday...(I will).

I'm influenced by painters, once in a while.  I'm lucky enough to know Won Sook, in person and to be able to be inspired by her on a regular basis - but others long gone can hold sway: Breugel's Icarus (combined w/Auden's Musee Des Beaux Arts) led me to a song


which led Arbutus Cunningham to a story. 

and which led artist Edward Bernstein to a print sculpture

All four pieces entitled 'Icarus.'

So the crux of the biscuit, or rather, the wax in the wing is?

Look around.  It's everywhere.  Art, that is.  The reasons for making it, appreciating it, hating it, loving it... art breeds art - and it's a wormhole to another universe at times - and maybe a key to our human evolution.  Getting caught up in the pretention of what some people can make of it is a bloody waste of time, and an evolutionary dead end.


It's the best of what we are and  maybe our greatest hope. 

 
That and really powerful antibiotics.  But you get the idea.