glass is no water

glass and water have the same colour. but the similarity ends there.

glass looks like glass, sounds like glass, feels like glass, breaks like glass.

water looks like water, sounds like water, feels like water, flows like water.

the two are different.

so what happens when you blow the water. or blow into the glass.

i don't need pictures here, because i just know how it looks then. you know it as well.

so, being an artist, if i want to show a broken blue plastic sheet, and i show it like a broken glass, the viewer will see it not as a plastic sheet, but made of a blue coloured glass.

and the viewer wont stop here. s/he will apply other properties of glass to it - like the 'ting', the sharpness.

if i show a hand on top, the viewer will see an image of blood.

with our experience of life, each of these nuances, which we would not know we know are so deep in our subconscious that fighting them with an image is just not possible, when the only means of communication is the picture itself.

Some artists like dali, used the melting clocks to depict time as he saw it (well, my interpretation). Like a continuum of seconds, dropping heavily to gravity thus feeling like something that at some point is bound to melt on the floor and vanish away / turn useless like a molten ice cream.

so while time melts away the memory, the picture persists. as is.

The question is, will a viewer carry his intuitions and preoccupations and all these details of materials and flows and sounds without having any awareness of the same when he views an abstract work.

i am sure he will. in fact more so because we are all scared of abstracts - the patterns we don't get, no  one answers what it is, it's outright ridiculous. his intuition is the only way he can make some sense before he runs away.

so when an abstract painter creates a work like this, people see water, light, shore, sky, universe, horizon, floating objects, because that is the way he has seen water reflecting or bird flying.

glass is no water.