Sunday, February 27, 2005
Blink a thousand words
I don't always find time to update my blog. And many a times I am short of time to even reflect upon my day, and I feel guilty for not having contributed something to my blog, as that is my voice, my expression, my proof of having been here. I was thinking about this today, and a gentle and reassuring thought struck me. The thought was that every picture is worth a thousand words, and I began to feel comfortable that though I may not have enough time to write onto my blog, but I do collect a lot of pictures and uploading one of them on a busy day would not really take too much time. And guess what, a picture would express me as good as a thousand words or even more.
We people have the gift of speech, but in effect it is a curse in disguise. We have lost the feeling for the visual, audio, sensory elements of communication. We now only understand words, not the tone as much, the glare but not the glance as much. We could have mastered the art of communication, but we instead have now mastered the art of conversation. I am happy that I still do have an eye for beauty, so to say and I still do collect anything that looks beautiful and I love to share it. I express more effectively that way.
Click here to read "Macbeth - The entire play"
I have always been an ardent fan of Shakespeare for his power of painting elaborate pictures with seemingly normal words. Words that you and I know, but fail to know the power of. He may have imagined the scene when he wrote on paper, and so many painters have come thereafter and painted on those words. The outcomes are always different but the effect is always the same. When you look at the paintings shown here, try and look at the individual elements of the paintings and you will realise that each word that shakespeare wrote has expressed something that the painter had to incorporate. These paintings can almost set the mood for the whole play to follow. Rest your glance on the poster of Macbeth for sometime and you can sense the evil in the air, and look at the poster of "As you like it" and you will be filled with a sense of adoloscent confusion amidst a voraciously colourful world. That is what I meant when I said that "A picture is worth a thousand words."
We should take time and look around us carefully, we should listen to sounds that await discovery, feel the breeze in its expressive touch, take time to understand ourselves and everything around us. Communicate, don't converse. Don't try to speak a thousand words to express your heart, just become a picture so that, the person you want to communicate to, can blink in a thousand words, as they were said, with no loss of emotions, feelings, meaning or time. We can't write or speak like Shakespeare and words, in today's world, have become tools that have lost their edge. Pictures,though, are still the sharpest tools of communication that we are endowed with. Expressions are strongest when nothing is said or heard, but solely felt.
I have always been an ardent fan of Shakespeare for his power of painting elaborate pictures with seemingly normal words. Words that you and I know, but fail to know the power of. He may have imagined the scene when he wrote on paper, and so many painters have come thereafter and painted on those words. The outcomes are always different but the effect is always the same. When you look at the paintings shown here, try and look at the individual elements of the paintings and you will realise that each word that shakespeare wrote has expressed something that the painter had to incorporate. These paintings can almost set the mood for the whole play to follow. Rest your glance on the poster of Macbeth for sometime and you can sense the evil in the air, and look at the poster of "As you like it" and you will be filled with a sense of adoloscent confusion amidst a voraciously colourful world. That is what I meant when I said that "A picture is worth a thousand words."
We should take time and look around us carefully, we should listen to sounds that await discovery, feel the breeze in its expressive touch, take time to understand ourselves and everything around us. Communicate, don't converse. Don't try to speak a thousand words to express your heart, just become a picture so that, the person you want to communicate to, can blink in a thousand words, as they were said, with no loss of emotions, feelings, meaning or time. We can't write or speak like Shakespeare and words, in today's world, have become tools that have lost their edge. Pictures,though, are still the sharpest tools of communication that we are endowed with. Expressions are strongest when nothing is said or heard, but solely felt.
They say to make someone laugh is the toughest part of any artist's job. I agree, because words were never really meant to make anyone laugh, they are still only a mode of conversation, whereas laughter is the end result of absolute communication devoid of ego, voice, tone, facial expressions, or any other form of man made distractions. Laughter by images hence, is the purest form of communication known to man, and we are rapidly loosing it. Shown here is one of the better know results of the power of visual communication.
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