WELCOME to Discover Arts!
This is a place of exploration, discovery, and sharing of our ideas and experiences around any and all art forms: painting, music, architecture, literature, sculpture, poetry, etc. If something aims to share experiences of beauty, of meaning, and just plain joy of creation, here is where we aim to bring those feelings and expressions together into common view. In this context the word “art” can mean anything, in any medium. It’s a type of experience, not restricted to any one form.
This site is lovingly dedicated to my mother, Betty Ch’maj, who taught me how to SEE and UNDERSTAND the arts, and my father, John Chmaj, who taught me how to HEAR pretty much any kind of western music. I was blessed with parents who had a passion and penchant for aesthetic experience, and hope to pass whatever wisdom I’ve gleaned from them and others to you.
Very short aesthetic bio: I am fundamentally a professionally trained musician, raised as an academic, who has spent the last 35 years building libraries of information in high tech while working my aesthetic ideas forward. I’ve given a lot of thought to the elements of artistic experience, but have hesitated to share it as I wasn’t sure it was “correct”. But later in life I’ve realized we’re all on this journey of discovery together, and as my musical mentor Robert Cogan once told me “you can’t know the ANSWER until you’ve actually asked the QUESTION”. So let’s explore together, acknowledging that our experiences are personal, ever evolving, and thus never complete. The best – and most important thing – we can do is pose meaningful questions, try them out, and see what happens.
Nobody can experience art works for you. I would also assert that nobody can tell you what they are about, ultimately. That’s up to you. Artistic experience is, and should be, personal and largely unspoken. Art forms have their own language: they aim to impart ideas, feelings that range beyond verbal or mental perception. Yet they rely on aspects of perception to impart their meanings. More on that later.
Another consideration that has held me back from sharing my ideas is the knowledge that writing words about artistic experience is fundamentally limited, and to a degree presumptuous. As the Buddhist saying goes: “the shadow of the moon on the wall is NOT the moon”. No amount of words can substitute for one’s personal experience of any work of art. And yet, language is our basic tool of sharing part of our experience. So let’s acknowledge this limitation and see where and how we can use language itself creatively, leverage the language of images, animations, drawings, etc. to at least ‘point to the moon’. Or maybe carve a piece of it off to view and hear in new and different ways.
The most important thing in developing one’s ability to adventure among the arts is to become aware of one’s own layers of consciousness, and develop them. Sure, the structure, vocabulary and style of a work of art is important and helpful to understand such that one can properly interpret the artists’ and mediums’ language. But that is means to an end – as per John Dewey’s title of his aesthetic tome “Art As Experience”. One could argue that art IS experience of a certain kind. So let’s start exploring! All you need is your ability to be and stay present to your experience, learn to look and hear in new ways, and be open to what comes forth. Artistic experience is a mode of consciousness. You can turn it on any time: when looking at nature, works of art, or just doing day to day things. The more we can develop this type of attention, the more deeply we can experience art, and also the world.
John Chmaj