Back when I was doing Inktober several years ago, I shared an imaginary art friend — my cheeky “monkey mind”. We played silly browsing games, put disparate prompts together to find the perfect subject for each day’s ink drawing, and while I don’t know about you, I know I had a lot of fun.
While I haven’t written much about “Monkey Mind” for a very long time, rest assured, he’s always here inside my head. He’s a curious fellow, gets excited over things he discovers, and often leads me off on searches for the most unusual thing.
Today, my “monkey mind” was browsing around on the topic of our five senses, more specifically about the role our senses play in art. We think of art as primarily visual, of course, although many contemporary artists are finding ways to incorporate other senses into “art installations”.
Yet we don’t have to reserve “sensory impressions” for modern art. We can visit classic paintings from bygone eras and not just SEE them, but EXPERIENCE them with all of our senses, if we know how to do it.
Just take a look at this painting.
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Let’s go over the academic details first, all right? This is “Still Life with Monkey, Fruits, and Flowers”. Oh, how happy my silly “monkey mind” was to see a creature of his own kind, but, again, back to the academics here. The painting is by Jean Baptiste Oudry (French, 1686–1755), completed in 1724. It is part of a collection of European works at The Art Institute of Chicago, although it is not currently on display.
The description provided by the gallery tells us:
Jean-Baptiste Oudry received numerous commissions from Louis XV of France, who admired his skill as a painter of animals and still lifes. The artist frequently combined his two specialties, as in this work, in which a monkey, an animal celebrated in this period for its mischievous and lustful character, snatches a few grapes. The French Rococo taste for the sensual is manifest in the lush, overripe quality of the fruits and flowers, reminiscent of 17th-century Flemish works that Oudry is known to have studied. Paintings such as this typically adorned dining rooms as part of an overall decorative scheme.
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Lovely painting, and such a fun painting in so many ways! And what does this have to do with the idea of “sensory experience” in art? Turning again to The Art Institute of Chicago, here’s a delightful video from Kinneret Kohn, one of the museum’s educators. The video is designed for students in grades 1-5, but please don’t let that stop you from watching and enjoying. I loved this video. I found this one of the most entertaining “art films” I’ve come across — and I’ll give thanks to my cheeky little “monkey mind” for leading me to the site.
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We should do this more often, I think. What we see when we view art is only a part of the story. We are humans with multiple senses. Let us put those senses to use more fully!
Think now for a moment of paintings you’d like to explore with your five senses, and make it a point in upcoming days to really “step in” to those paintings, not just seeing, but hearing, tasting, touching, and breathing in all the wondrous details on the canvas.
Now, I’m off to follow Cheeky Monkey Mind to wherever else he might lead me today!
Artistcoveries 