Nonverbal Communication
Above is one of my abstract artworks that I created while listening to “happy and slow” music. Without pausing to gather my thoughts, I decided to directly express the emotions felt at the moment through paint and paper.
Yesterday, I read an excerpt of Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thoughts for one of my enrolled classes and this excerpt made me question everything in life. He goes on about defining ecological thoughts but also elaborated on the meanings with art. I was fairly intrigued when he mentioned art possibly because my major is based upon art but also because I believe art is the only way people are able to express their feelings or emotions without using any words.
Timothy Morton explains that ecological thoughts are thoughts of the interconnectedness. This means that ecological thoughts are not immensely about just some thoughts based on the concept of ecology, but is actually the thought that everything is connected to one another like a “virus that infects all other areas of thinking”. One action that I take right now can affect me for the rest of my life or may just connect to the next step of my life. The ecological thoughts place many questions towards life in general because what even is the world if everything in the world is ambiguous and undefined.
In this instance, the ideas of ambiguity connects to art. Artworks tend to have the artist’s intention at start, but the thematic approach from the start can be completely different when people analyze and observe into the artworks itself. Due to everyone having lifestyles that are variant, their view can differ compared to a view from someone else. Nothing being the right answer keeps artists questioning their intentions and the unconscious thoughts that they could’ve had while creating the artworks.
Abstract art is one of the artworks that I love to spend time looking into because of the infinite directions the “definitions” can go into. Personally, I think abstract art is the only way someone can express their emotions at the moment without verbally pronouncing a single thing. As someone that tends to struggle with expressing their emotions without thinking too deeply into it, abstract artworks gives me an opportunity to capture the feelings without any alterations over time. It may not be everyone’s favorite because it is difficult to understand, but if people look into abstract art from their gut feelings and not with their intellectual mind, they may possibly feel the emotions that the artists exposed into the artworks.
Morton, Timothy. “The Ecological Thoughts.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, by Vincent B. Leitch, W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 2621
