What goes on in your (he)art?

I’m reading quite a few books on Art and Art Instruction / Techniques currently. Quite a few of these I picked up while visiting a second hand book store recently. One of my finds was the book on color by Johannes Itten Art of Color, now no longer in print. One of the others that I picked up on impulse is a book by Jeffrey Hogrefe, O'Keeffe - The Life of an American Legend. I must confess that I did not know of her or her work other than the fact that she painted flowers and that description didn’t quite make me want to rush out and look her up.

The book is very interesting and I’m beginning to see why artists in the past have had such bohemian reputations. Some of it is of their own doing and quite a bit of it is based on interpretation and judgements that people pass about them and their work. O'Keeffe apparently did not see the same things that the critics or her husband Alfred Stieglitz did and nor did she it seems have those notions in her head when she painted her art. But and yes there’s a but.

I also bought another book called Luscher’s Color Test at this very same book shop. That shop was a veritable treasure trove. On discovering that the color cards for the test were missing I went surfing, stumbled across a couple of tests, tried them out and they were pretty accurate. I hadn't realised that colors could reveal so much about us and so easily. Having had a go at a HTP (House Tree Person) test as part of my Organizational Behaviour course in college and being taken aback with the revelations, I shouldn't have been this time around.

And here's the but I mentioned earlier. We do reveal a lot about ourselves without realizing some of it we know about and some is from our subconscious mind. Of course a lot depends on the accuracy of the interpretations.

The title was inspired by lines in a Beatles song which has been playing on and on in my head - What goes on your heart, what goes on in your mind? I’m not sure whether I’m singing these words to myself or thinking about Georgia O’Keeffe's thoughts while she painted.

This article also appears on my site draw the line