I once was in the National Gallery of Art and found myself totally immersed in Rembrant’s self portrait, painted in 1640. I knew very little about his life, but after being with that painting for 20 minutes, I started to feel as he were standing right there with me, sharing his world with me.
It was fully alive for me and the experience as profound as if we had just had a conversation….maybe even more so, in that words can often obscure the true essence of someone.
The aliveness energy that comes thought masterful art transcends time. It is “out of time” in a way, at least out of time as we experience it in our left-brain dominant, linear-thinking world.
I had a similar experience in a totally different venue - at an artist’s home in Sedona. She painted wolves, shamans, and other-worldly landscapes.
While we saw so many wonderful and truly gifted artists in that area, her work had an extra-dimensional quality that took it beyond great art. Her paintings paintings come alive in a way others had not.
I felt like I was in desert where all these people and animals where there, alive and breathing all around me. I was not just an observer, but an active participant in the experience of the art.
Aliveness energy goes beyond logical reasoning alone, into a non-verbal state of pure experience. It's multidimensional, impacting experience at more than one dimension simultaneously.
With aliveness energy combined with mastery of a craft - and a deeply present state - the creator of the art and the experiencer share a moment out of time - a connection, a feeling, an understanding that goes beyond age, culture, language, and time.
It that moment, there is a relationship between the creator and the experiencer of the creation, even a kindredness. The relationship to time and space temporarily changes.
Art has this power to unite people across space and time, it is there for all of us. We don’t all have the same gifts, skills and levels of talent in the same ways, but we all have access to the creative unconscious, where this energy exists and the power to create from what is most alive in us. And that aliveness speaks!
Not only can we access this energy as individuals, but as groups, in a co-created group field. A transformational power can be unleashed in our lives, organizations, communities - both individually and collectively - by valuing and harnessing the alive energy of what's still unseen, and calling to emerge.