Art and the Blue Flower
- Apr 2
- 4 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Art keeps perception alive
I want to start in the Modigliani room at the National Gallery in DC.
I remember standing there with my mom a few years ago. She really loved these paintings. My first reaction? A lot of strange faces with long necks and empty eyes. But then she started pointing out small details in the paintings—some had irises, and others didn't. Or the postures. One had an arrogant posture that reminded her of a cousin. And I saw it immediately. Then there was another one with eyebrows that looked like a “V” which made him look just like a politician we knew. These paintings, and this room, took on a whole new significance. They came alive.
I would watch other people hurry through the room, glancing quickly at each painting before moving on, and I wanted to stop them. “You’re missing something here.”
This important museum, with these important pieces of art, all that fell away in that moment. I was transported to a different world. And now that my mom is gone, I would give anything to walk through that room with her again.
There's beautiful art, and then there's sublime art. But what I'm talking about here is the actual reaction that can occur when something stops just being paint on a canvas or sound in the air (music) and becomes emotionally resonant. You know what I’m talking about. The lift. It's something you feel before you understand. It’s when it turns from some “thing” you’re looking at (or listening to) and it becomes a feeling.
It could be a piece of music. It could be a painting that changes the whole atmosphere in a room. Maybe it's a line in a book or a movie that opens up a door to you. In fact, thinking back, it was just this type of experience that sparked my initial interest in philosophy. I read George Berkeley’s quote about “essence is perception” and decades later I’m still thinking about it.
But that initial experience is always visceral, instinctive— like an animal. This feeling comes first. The explanation or language for it comes later, if ever.
And if that experience is powerful enough, it can transport you. Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” would be an example of a lift where the emotion has just exceeded the bounds of containment. It overwhelms you.
But art is usually not “big” like this. It’s quiet and personal. Like with me and Berkeley. It’s why certain works of art attach themselves to periods of our lives. They're not objects anymore, but rather emotional time stamps. You remember who you were when it reached you.
Art is inevitable. It’s what keeps perception alive. And as the world becomes more mundane, and as it speeds up, art takes on even more significance. Like the Romantics of 250 years ago, we're searching for those moments that transcend. Meaning, beauty, and moments that feel like home. This, as you know, is the basic idea behind the Blue Flower and Sparkle Valley.
The Blue Flower is that longing, the feeling that beyond the surface there's a life with mystery and connection and transcendence that just waiting to be discovered.
Art is about getting closer to that feeling. About getting closer to the Blue Flower itself. You can never reach it, but the search matters and the search changes you. That feeling, that sudden lift when the art stops being an object and becomes an experience, that’s what I keep coming back to.
Art wakes us up
It’s that moment when art comes alive. You feel it before you fully understand it.
Kurt Vonnegut put it simply:
“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.”
We’ve been talking here about observing art, but Vonnegut also talked about the importance of creating art. He wrote a famous letter that contains a mashed potato reference that always stuck with me. You can read that here.
Art helps us see differently
This was one of the lessons I learned in the Modigliani room.
Mark Rothko, who also has a room at the National Gallery that I love, understood this:
“A painting is not a picture of an experience. It is an experience.”
And Nabokov, who compared butterflies to art, said something similar:
“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”
Art fights flattening
Our world today is all about speed. Clicks not depth. I think about those tourists at the museum checking the paintings off their list.
Jean Baudrillard wrote:
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
Art keeps perception alive.
You can view art as a way of seeing—an openness. Children are naturally open to the world. They notice things, linger, and feel things first. It’s all instinct. Paul Klee noted this, and thought some of the greatest art comes from children because they hadn’t learned to shut the world out yet.
It’s not easy to keep that world open. Because art asks something difficult. It asks us to stay open and to pay attention. Much easier to just shut it down.
Wordsworth describes that loss:
“Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;”
Novalis wrote:
“To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world.”
Art, as my mom helped me realize in the Modigliani room, reminds us that the world is deeper than it first appears.
