Art is often used to tell a story about life, our lives, lives around us and the planet we live on. What art is, is hard to define but I like to think of art as that activity or product that is depicting life as it is not. In abstract art that is pretty obvious but a picture or painting of nature or a great poem or song can often strife to mimic, or rhapsodize about real life, but it will never comes close… enough. Every decision and detail has a purpose when you make a picture or write a song, there is a process going on, often unintended. There is no camera that can duplicate reality and the words we use to describe our world have changing meanings and interpretations, reality can only be approached.

The picture I used today is not necessary art but you can clearly see that it is nature with some dramatic clouds. That it is a black and white picture makes it immediately not a candidate for most accurate picture showing what I see from my garden, but the clouds are over dramatic without a doubt. In real life the sky was bright and I could see some clouds but there was no storm coming. But I like the stormy clouds in my picture, I created them by sliding some virtual sliders on my computer, easy. The strange thing is that I have seen clouds like that in the past, all dark and foreboding, at least I think I did. It is hard to recall what I saw in the past, I only have a vague image, like the once you see in your peripheral vision. Now I think of it, are there clouds that are almost black, or are they just dark grey in reality? I doubt myself now, maybe my memory is like art and used a mood slider on me, maybe it also depicts life as it is not.

What does art mean to you?

Ps. for the people that are interested, the “mood” slider in Lightroom is for me the dehaze one most of the time… I haven’t found a similar one inside me though…