Vision, Awareness, Transformation

Christiane Pflug   Kitchen Door with Esther   oil on canvas   1965

"Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly.  It is also a changing of vision. . .  Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means?  Some hunger for more is in us--more range, more depth, more feeling; more associative freedom, more beauty.  More perplexity and more friction of interest.  More prismatic grief and unstunted delight, more longing, more darkness.  More saturation and permeability in knowing our own existence as also the existence of others.  More capacity to be astonished.  Art adds to the sum of the lives we would have, were it possible to live without it.  And by changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share. . .   Artists. . . perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look.  Within a summoned and hybrid awareness, the inner reaches out to transform the outer, and the outer reaches back to transform the one who sees. . .   To form the intention of new awareness is already to transform and be transformed."

--Jane Hirschfield   Ten Windows