Notes on Magic and Art

Notes on Magic and Art:

1. The earliest cave drawing are found in the presence of what could be primitive shrines as if the paintings were used for magic purposes.

2. During the Middle Ages, people worked in the fields. They were illiterate and rarely saw art, or pictures, except when they went to the Cathedrals on holidays or Sunday.

3. In Islam today it is forbidden to make a realistic representation of a human, presumably because of some supernatural danger.

4. During the Renaissance, painters used the Camera Obscura for almost one hundred years without detection so they could “magically” and with “great skill” produce photorealistic portraits.

5. Some primitive peoples are reported to have believed that posing for photographic pictures is bad because the camera will steal your soul.

6. Thesis: in earlier times the picture evoked a strong, almost magical response in the viewer because of the unique rarity and realistic artistic skill.

7. Today we are surrounded with so many images, and paintings, and photographs and advertisements, and videos, and films, and billboards, that the individual image has almost lost its power.

8. In the past it was laboriously difficult to render a realistic and convincing painting or image. Today it is almost trivial to manufacture, create, reproduce, duplicate, and publish images.

9. Art has explored all the ways to display, distort, enhance, or copy the image in painting, print and photography.

10. The painted image is losing its magical power and therefore losing its artistic significance.

11. Voodoo shrines have certain objects arranged in a specific way for special magical significance.

12. "Feng Shui" is the Traditional Chinese practice of arranging objects in the environment to affect the flow of energy in the room or environment.

13. "I Ching" followers toss yarrow stalks, or cast coins that determine numbers to build a pattern which is key to their personal understanding of future fortunes.

14. “Sympathetic Magic” is the practice of “acting” on a symbolic object in hopes of affecting the actual object of intent

15. Artistic arrangements of found objects can release the impression of magical coincidence latent in the subconscious mind, because of the unique arrangement and relation of symbolic objects.

16. Artistic arrangements of found objects, or assemblage art, may replace traditional painting as the interesting and inspiring aesthetic of the future, because it still has the power to trigger magical associations in the conscious and sub conscious mind of the viewer.


 June 25, 2019, copyright © 2019 William Schaeffer