Response: The White Bird

If I remember correctly, when an overview of what the reading was about was being given it was said that it was about John describing the bird as art. Either that or something along does lines, and now having read it I understand what was meant by that. One part I liked was how he broke down the bird into the five qualities that provoke a sense of being before a mystery which, I realized after reading those three paragraphs, are qualities of many different artworks. What does it mean, if there is any meaning to begin with? How was it made? Those are two questions that usual cross my mind when looking at artwork.

The section about nature and our view of it got thinking: mostly about my view of it. Most of the time when I’m walking to and from a bus stop I’ll go into this state of mind where I’ll just blankly observe my surrounds. I don’t look for anything specific; I just look around and try to notice what catches my eye. I tend to do this whenever I don’t have to focus on anything in particular. Now while doing this the other day I started to focus on trees and asked myself “Why are trees so appealing to people?” I wondered, and still do, why and how something so organic in shape and structure can be so appealing. That’s something I would like to translate into my work one day. I don’t know if that was too random but that’s kind of where my head went after getting through that section of the reading.

There are three (technically four) sentences that caught my interest, while reading, and that I highlighted:

1. One is looking at something that has been worked with a mysterious skill and a kind of love. 
2. However it is encountered, beauty is always an exception, always in despite of. This is why it moves us.
3. All the languages of art have been developed as an attempt to transform the instantaneous into the permanent.

Sadly I forgot why the first sentence caught my interest. As for the second one, I like how he described beauty because I feel like we always try and find the beauty in most situations. The third sentence reminded me of something I tend to hear quite a bit, which is that art is a way that people try and capture an event or how they felt during an event and translate it into a permanent representation that other people might be able to understand.