Exquisite Intensity

I had an art professor who said you can recognize good art because it has an effect on you, it influences you in some deeply primal way.

Great art does more than that for me. It permeates my being at the exact moment I am immersed in it. I don’t have to think about how I feel, or what I am thinking. In fact, it would never even occur to me to think about these things in my initial exposure to it.

Like the time I turned from a Monet to find myself face to face with a Van Gogh, it completely overtakes me, often leaving me in tears because I am so overwhelmed. When I am in awe of a piece of music, or painting, or movie, or anything that touches me profoundly, I am lost in it.

For that moment in time I am it. I am so vulnerable, I feel it in every one of my senses. When I am finally able to turn away, I am depleted, worn out, so pleasantly sated that I just want to lie back, or go sit some where and contemplate the experience.

Then, like a child, I want to experience it again and again. Looking, listening, reaching back into it for those very first impressions until it becomes so ingrained that I know it like I know my own face.

Obviously this doesn’t happen very often, but when it does? It is one of those moments that leaves me hanging in mid-air, quivering with an exquisite intensity I never forget.