Sometimes the beauty of an artwork is obvious, other times it takes perseverance to uncover a surprising splendor that we were originally blind to. In some ways I like that kind of art most of all, an unexpected pleasure, a discovery. Jeanette Winterson says that “the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue,” and I think that she is right. Because looking at art can be difficult, especially art that isn’t beautiful first off, we don’t allow ourselves time to really see and instead seek a quantifiable method of understanding it. The public art experience, the one that we have in a gallery or museum provides a yard-stick; the intellectual rhetoric of the wall plaque, the canonization of the artist and the price tag are the criteria that we can more easily judge art by. The key when looking at ‘difficult’ art is taking the time to look at the elements at play within the piece, the line, the space, the color, the form. When we really look at theses elements and the interactions between them we can start to develop a relationship with the work and often find beauty in the unexpected. We begin to realize that the art mirrors the complexity of our own lives and it becomes hard to look away.  

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