i'm an art lover...

toccata and allison both posted art the other day. i hate to be left out so i decided to play too. and since i just finished reading a book on a certain artist, it seemed appropriate. (ps... yes, i know i haven't updated my current reading material on my sidebar, but that's because i am still reading that book. not because it is bad, but because i couldn't find it for months. i finally found it a couple of weeks ago. plus i'm one of those people who is always reading two or three books at once.)

although i took a lot of art classes in school, i didn't really have any kind of grasp of art history or art appreciation until i went to europe for the first time. it's amazing what actually seeing a piece of art can do to a person. it was there that i discovered one of my favourite artists.

i remember the first time i saw his work so clearly. we were in the kelvingrove museum in glasgow. i was kinda wandering around on my own. my friend 'r' had a more developed sense of art appreciation that i did at the time, so she tended to need more time than i did. in fact, it was because of her that we were going to so many museums. i remember looking down this long hallway and seeing this piece.
i was mesmerized. awestruck. i had never seen a piece of art that made me feel like that before. it wasn't just some pretty picture in a book. it suddenly occurred to me why people see art in person rather than in a book. the size, the colour, the details, none of that could translate into a tiny photgraph. the idea that someone had actually painted this sent my brain into overdrive. after staring at the piece for ages, i finally went closer to see what it was called and who had painted it. i learnt that it was called 'christ of saint john of the cross' and it was by salvador dali. i remember being totally confused. dali? isn't he that crazy spanish guy? he did this?

shortly afterwards, we went to the tate gallery in london. they too had dali on display. but totally different from the kelvingrove. pieces like "lobster telephone" and "the metamorphosis of narcissus". these were more traditional dali pieces but seeing all these pieces helped me realize that as an artist, one didn't have to choose to be a painter or a sculptor. one could paint, make three-d pieces, sculpt, whatever struck you. and you could explore everything you felt. you could do something semi-traditional and then turn around and do something bizarre. it just needed to move you.