CerModern Excursion – Rain - The Lodger

Erwin Olaf, does a great job at capturing emotions and reflecting them to his audience. His depiction of a man in the his artwork “The Lodger” is one that has spoke to me the most. Superficially, the man is just a man in a house. But when you look closely in to the photograph, you start to see some details in the picture that make it what it is. The man in the photograph has and expression on his face that suggests he is not happy with where he is. He is rather desperate for some help. His duffel bag seems to tell us that he is moving away and the tattoo on his chest tells us that he does have hopes of leaving and going away for some time. The look on his face is annoyed and you can tell it is because of his current situation.
When Loren Eiseley said that humans possessed great art a long time ago, he was quite right. Even though the art in Laceaux caverns are nowhere near what we see here today we can understand what Eiseley was reffering to. Look at this one small photograph of a man standing. How many things do you understand about the man? How much can you know about him by simply looking at his facial expressions? Although all these are true of what Eiseley wrote, without the intellectual capacity that man has and that which also isolates him from the rest of the beings on our wonderful planet, the understanding of thsi picture would be impossible.
The artist can not succeed his task simply by painting or taking a picture. The audience needs to be involved and needs to be able to think about what the artist meant when doing what he did. The painting is merely a messenger between the painter and the audience. It can have any meaning in the world depending on who looks at it. The man in the photograph I chose might seem desperate to me but to some other viewer, he will seem troubled or sad. Without the contribution of the intellectual capacity of man, a photograph or a painting is nothing of worth. Humans interact in many more ways than just talking, and the visual arts is simply one of them. Just as a musician needs to imagine as he composes, so does an artist have to think of what he is doing or what message he sends when he is drawing. Without these cognitive processes, we are nothing and art is non-existent.