If you can imagine it, you can create it.
If you can dream it, you can become it.
William Arthur Ward
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About Me
- Dewi Susanti
- I am an educationist and social development specialist. In my previous career, I practiced and taught architecture. I currently resides in Jakarta, while work and leisure take me at times to remote parts of Indonesia and elsewhere.
Assorted Items
Like thoughts: Things sold, things (not) needed, but perhaps desired.
Tuk Tuk Ride
A man looking back towards the camera. A woman holding the camera, her reflection off of the viewfinder of the car. Who is reflecting whom? Who is capturing whom?
An Early Worker
Fish Market, Carita.
4 comments:
Hello,
I came across your blogs by searching for information on Louis I.Kahn.
In the mid 90`s I attended a time management seminar,which put great emphazise on giving your plans clear structure by analysing what one really wants.
A key phrase was:
"If you can dream it you can do it" Another version of what you state here. The rest is more or less a mechanical process how to get to what you want. But first you have to imagine !
In my life I found a great deal of truth in these statements.
In my free time I do landscape drawing. Through that activity I ended up at architecture. A book on Louis I. Kahn was one of the most impressing books I ever had in hands. Modern european painters have withdrawn from landscape which I find a pity. I seek the encounter by walking around on the land and in the city. There is an abundance of things to read in the face of a city or even a village.
Architecture I finally understood is one of the most important things in life,but only few people are aware of it.
Finally let me say that to my surprise it´s seems to be a certain responsible fraction of architects who care about beauty and balance in public space,our environment. Fine artists unfortunately seem to have lost faith and competence in this field.
freiluftmaler: yes, kahn is amazing, isn’t he? and i do agree with you that imaginations and dreams often are the key to making progress in life. could the very landscape you are talking about as being abandoned by european painters has tranformed?
Hello
of course landscape in europe has changed a lot by industrialisation since mid of the 19. century. But in western contemporary art painting landscapes is considered a terrible common place and the lowest possible denominator to communicate with viewers for other reasons.
The uprise of abstract art after world war1 and 2 was not only the end of landscape painting,but of representational art in general. Those who made and make money in the art business liked this development very much as traditonal quality criteria were demolished and almost anything hang up at the wall could be called art and earn loads of money. Remember just the water closet installed by Marcel Duchamp.
As a result nowadays none of the painters can depict beauty of a landscape without putting his career at risk. After all I would see this development mainly as a result of the strong market power of leading galleries and collections and their financial interests.
I should’ve made myself clearer that what I meant by landscape being transformed is not simply the physical landscape, but also how artists see landscape. I don’t understand abstract art either, and most are difficult to appreciate without knowing the story behind the art. This is obviously in contrast with, if I’m not mistaken, the realistic style you’re referring to.
But I am continuously fascinated by abstract art and its derivative, because the intent of the artists (like Duchamp) is not simply to represent the things we see in our environment, but also how it can be represented, felt, perceived, touched; what it can represent, how this affects and is affected not just by the objective perception of the individual artists, but also the very culture they live in. In doing so, I believe they also construct new understandings and bring new lights to how we see things.
Granted, some abstract artists do abstract art for financial reason, but I’m sure some others do have certain ideals and do look at and represent the world differently. But I must admit that some of the visual/ spatial products are not necessarily pleasing to our senses. Then again, that’s not seem to be the intent of these artists.
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