grief

I saw this painting at the art museum in Chicago, amidst hundreds of other marvels.  I am always impressed by the impressionists and pre-post-and pseudo impressionists.  I am in love with light and the portrayal of illumination.  It draws me into its depicted warmth and suddenly even the subject is secondary to the experience of luminosity.  I appreciate this same quality in photography, enthralled by radiance and captured brilliance.  At times like these, I remember my years at the University of San Francisco through the remembered fog of youth.  I do recall, however dimly, a biological psychology lecture in which the professor talked about the visual/auditory-wave theory, which suggests the world "out there" doesn't exist in the way we imagine.  In fact, it postulates that the world is an array of "waves"(think auditory waves and light waves) which are interpreted by the brain into "meaningful data".  If that is true than we are constructing our world through the lens of our own consciousness, in much the same way that mystics have been alluding to for years.  This was one of those rare college lectures in which I sat up and listened.  I have always loved anything that questions my constricted, conceptual reality and I experience that same existential uncertainty each time I view a painting, like the one above, and topple into it's brilliance, reflecting the uncertainty of liberation.