We asked a handful of Hopkins artists, who drew on personal experience to grapple for an answer.
Art is about paying attention.
Anderson Years ago, artist Gahan Wilson published a cartoon of a painter working outdoors, in an idyllic glen full of wildflowers, fawns, bunnies, and butterflies. The painter's canvas, set on an easel in the cartoon's foreground, is covered with a hideous montage of oozing sores and other images of suppuration. Wilson was spoofing his artistic brethren, but what distinguishes painters from non-painters is more than the desire and ability to apply paint to canvas. Painters do see things that other people do not, both in the surrounding world and on the canvas before them. Vincent Van Gogh looks at a starry sky and sees a swirling maelstrom of emotion that transforms the heavens.