Paintings, Pictures - in fact all visual art - seems to have this quality of "silence" inherent to it. Vision in general has an air of an almost painful level of peace and contemplation, regardless of what the contents of that vision might be. A black-and-white snapshot of a busy street in Gujarat on a warm Tuesday afternoon; a group of civilians being evacuated from a fire gutting a midnight club in Turkey. A frenetic picnic selfie by a group of teens. Van Gogh's impressionist masterwork of a family grieving in the wake of a loss - all of these share that one essential ingredient - they, by their very existence, exude silence - calm, still and safely out of the way of time's turbulent flow.
On the other end of the artistic scale, we have language. A word swims in the pool of sound. Read something, and hear it being said to yourself. The intonations, the pronunciations, the tumble and the fall, the tide and the ebb - the most chaotic symphony that nature has produced thus far - language. The written word is a grandiose mountain set for an endless trek, every book and every scroll and every poem but a momentary rest halt, with the summit endlessly and alluringly out of reach.
And thus, language becomes the disorderly - but equally, if not more intense - counterpart to visual art. The neurotic younger brother to the composed older sibling. The young stumbling monk to the wise elder sage.
In sequential art comes the confluence of Vision and language. Silence bleeds into sound, and sound segues back into silence. The deafening clash of language and visuals senses rolls forth the rock of time; Visual art becomes a silent room, and language fills it with its terrifying din. The birth of drama. Movies, comics, Visual storybooks, theater.
And of course, daily life itself. We walk through a deathly silent world, dragging along the sound of our manic thoughts with us - a collection of the finest short (or ultra-short) stories ever written, into the splendid, silent empty vision of a hectic workplace, a perfectly still crowded bus on a Saturday night in downtown Bangalore. We punctuate this picture with the required level of cerebral chaos.We are the din, the younger sibling to the older sibling's physical universe.
We are the naive, stumbling monk brought up and cared for by elderly nature, and nature cannot afford to lose its monk without losing its chaotic music.
On the other end of the artistic scale, we have language. A word swims in the pool of sound. Read something, and hear it being said to yourself. The intonations, the pronunciations, the tumble and the fall, the tide and the ebb - the most chaotic symphony that nature has produced thus far - language. The written word is a grandiose mountain set for an endless trek, every book and every scroll and every poem but a momentary rest halt, with the summit endlessly and alluringly out of reach.
And thus, language becomes the disorderly - but equally, if not more intense - counterpart to visual art. The neurotic younger brother to the composed older sibling. The young stumbling monk to the wise elder sage.
In sequential art comes the confluence of Vision and language. Silence bleeds into sound, and sound segues back into silence. The deafening clash of language and visuals senses rolls forth the rock of time; Visual art becomes a silent room, and language fills it with its terrifying din. The birth of drama. Movies, comics, Visual storybooks, theater.
And of course, daily life itself. We walk through a deathly silent world, dragging along the sound of our manic thoughts with us - a collection of the finest short (or ultra-short) stories ever written, into the splendid, silent empty vision of a hectic workplace, a perfectly still crowded bus on a Saturday night in downtown Bangalore. We punctuate this picture with the required level of cerebral chaos.We are the din, the younger sibling to the older sibling's physical universe.
We are the naive, stumbling monk brought up and cared for by elderly nature, and nature cannot afford to lose its monk without losing its chaotic music.
