What you See is What You Get

 People do lots of different things after work and on their days off, but I doubt that most of them attach any philosophical meaning to it. If you ask them why they do it, they will just say that they like it, or their friends like it and they like their friends. There might be a few oddballs like us who try to find the deeper meaning of things, but I doubt that they are the majority. Even we oddballs only do what we do because we like to do it, so we're not all that high and mighty ourselves.

I've got a theory about art. I think that an artist sees things differently than a regular person, sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively. I read something once about one of the Impressionists, I think it was Monet. Isn't he the guy who made his paintings look kind of foggy, like you were looking at them through a dirty window? Well, whoever it was, I read that he might have actually seen the world that way. It has been speculated that he had some kind of undiagnosed vision problem and believed that things looked the same way to everybody else. On the other hand, maybe that's just the way he believed the world should look. Even if you guys don't literally see things differently than the rest of us, you may "see" things in your subject that we don't notice. Maybe you're trying to visualize the spirit of the thing. You can't see a spirit, but you can speculate about what a spirit might look like if you could see it. Music is certainly that way, only it's done through sound rather than eyesight.

I forgot to tell you before, but I clicked on the link to the preview of your coming art show at the Ten Cat. I found it interesting to compare your paintings to the photographs. While your work is clearly recognizable as depicting those buildings, it's certainly not exactly the same as the photos. Your buildings are a lot more colorful, and the lines aren't as straight. I have said before that I don't know much about art, so don't take this as criticism, it's just what I noticed. At least I can tell that they are the same buildings. Some of what used to be called "modern art" doesn't resemble anything in the real world as far as I'm concerned, but maybe it's not supposed to. Maybe it's not about what you see at all, but rather what you feel. 

Anyway, I think that your buildings are prettier than the ones in the photographs, although I might be a little nervous about taking an elevator to the top floor of one of them. That's probably because we are used to thinking of straight lines and square corners as being more stable than something that's a little out of plumb. Truth be known, mountains don't have straight lines and square corners, but they seem to be pretty stable. I guess it's all in how you look at it.