Grateful for art

Although art comes in many forms, I will concentrate on three pieces that I'm particularly grateful for. All of these have stirred something in me I didn't know existed before that moment.

1. Albert Edelfelt - Poltettu Kylä (Burnt Village - 1879)

I remember seeing the picture of this painting in my history book sometime during elementary school and I would go back to look at it every now and again during history lessons. (Judging from this repetitive action I probably wasn't paying enough attention to the teaching.)

It's a painting of peasant uprising during the Cudgel War (1596-1597) in the Kingdom of Sweden, which Finland at that point was also a part of. The painting obviously is a couple of hundreds years younger than the war itself, but nonetheless Albert Edelfelt has managed to capture some essential parts of the war: the fear, the simple weaponry, the conditions, the threat, the possibility of their lives ending in a few moments after "capturing" this image, either to the soldiers, hunger or to the winter. All of these points honestly freaked me out as a child.

The Burnt Village is also the first one that really got me into appreciating paintings, so I am truly grateful for it.

2. Vincent van Gogh - The Starry Night (1889)

As long as I remember back, I've loved Van Gogh's work. The first one I ever remember seeing is the poster of Café Terrace at Night hanging on my brother's wall. The first real painting of Van Gogh I only saw when I moved to Amsterdam in 2007 and visited the Van Gogh museum. However, The Starry Night, I have yet to see live, since it's placed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

There's something about Van Gogh's brushstrokes that really spoke to me. It all seems so "I could do that", but lol of course I couldn't. It's simple, but complex. There's something even more special about this painting when you add a hypnotizing spinning wheel with it. You can try out yourself how this painting comes to life with the help of this clip:




The third one I only learned about today. I was going to write about Katsushika Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa", which is a great piece that I was shortly obsessed about in my adolescent years, but then I saw an article about a pixel art experiment launched at Reddit during April Fool's day and because the whole meaning of it was so immense, I couldn't pass it for this list.

3. Reddit's "Place" (2017)

To quote this great piece: 

"It gave its users, who are all anonymous, a blank canvas called Place. 

The rules were simple. Each user could choose one pixel from 16 colors to place anywhere on the canvas. They could place as many pixels of as many colors as they wanted, but they had to wait a few minutes between placing each one.

Over the following 72 hours, what emerged was nothing short of miraculous. A collaborative artwork that shocked even its inventors."

And amazing it is! This piece goes to show humans can create incredible things together. It also goes to show how we need different forces to stay balanced. It's as if it's actually talking about something bigger, our purpose in this life, on this Earth, and that is why this last piece of art blew my mind tonight like the first piece of art shocking me as a child. It was about something so much more. I highly recommend to read the article linked before the quotation. It has amazing clips of different stages of "Place".

So whether we're talking about brushstrokes on the canvas, the emotions captured in a frozen moment or a collaborative, surprising piece of art, I'm incredibly grateful for art, for it gives food for thought like nothing else.