Were you to ask someone on the street if they like art, they would likely answer positively. One may not like certain kinds of art, but it's fair to say everyone has a positive connotation with at least some kind of art.

We like art because it's pleasant to look at-even if it is not a "pretty" piece. Political art or art designed to make a point about something difficult can still be a positive experience in that we can find ourselves stepping outside our normal way of processing the world-of seeing the world-to consider something more closely; to see something in a new way.

In looking at art, we are looking beyond a mere thing into an idea of a thing, as well as the specificity of that thing in a certain place, time, light, mood. In being shown something in a way that is new to us, we learn that seeing is not passive, and it is not fixed. Our seeing is a dialogue that changes with time and experience. This is why our visual tastes can change over time and it is why a work of art can come to mean more or less to you as time stretches between your interactions with it.

Gustave Caillebotte's painting of chrysanthemums. This piece is not typical of his work in its composition, or really in its palette, orientation, etc. The more I think about it, I wonder what came over him? Maybe he painted this for himself, taken by the beauty of the simple mass of flowers. Maybe it began as part of a larger work and he ended up slicing this piece off of a failed piece. This is all just daydreaming on my part, and I digress. I was not in a place where I was painting flowers, and in a place like the Met I don't know why this painting should have stopped me in my tracks, but it did. I literally fell in love with mums at that moment, and I have never looked at them the same way since.

The flipside of this seeing coin is that the way we experience and move through the world affects how we then see art. When I was young and a new painter, I was in love with realism. I still consider it my native tongue so to speak, but as I have matured as an artist, I have grown in my admiration for, and therefore love of, paintings that while representational, are not necessarily realist in the academic sense. As one moves through life, things tend to become less black and white. I learned of more views and perspectives, and I began to see that things could look different depending on the country, situation, time. I increasingly found that art that was less exact, less perfect, began to speak to me in a whole new way. I began to see much beauty in the whimsy- the imperfection of artists who colored outside the lines. The first artist I recall falling in love with was Claude Monet, and I was in 4th grade. By the time I graduated with an art history degree and knew everything there was to know in the world as all people aged 14-24 seem to, I found him overhyped, quaint, even, I am ashamed to say, vapid. But in time, as I began to look again, I returned to my original awe. He wasn't just painting pretty pictures, he was doing a whole new thing! Trying to capture light and atmosphere and the feeling of a place. He was interested in so much more than offering an alternative to a photograph. This place of admiration and understanding is one I would not have arrived at without doing some hard time in the world and beginning to understand things aren't always cut and dry, this or that. As time passes I grow in appreciation of art as an outworking of one's experience in the world and the way they know best to share certain feelings and thoughts with others.

My only marker of liking art when I was young was perhaps whether or not I would hang it on the wall of my home...like the Monet poster I proudly tacked to my bedroom wall as a kid. Now it has grown far deeper than that, and that is because where I once saw the world more narrowly because of my limited experience in interaction with it, time has led me to a broader and deeper appreciation of all the varied threads that make up this tapestry we call life. We may not like everything we see, but we learn from all of it and expanding vision is never a bad thing.