This post is the promised continuation of How to promote your favorite artistic experiment as a masterpiece in 3 easy steps. It is a useful skill for writing longer and even more pretensious museum labels, being disarmingly snarky at boring coctail parties, or getting people to move large trash (like old servers) out of the hallways at work.  All I ask is that you try to use this new skill for good and not evil (just try.)

The first step is to analze the artwork for anything that could be construed as opposites.  In our lovely doodle above, here are just some of the options:

• Black and white
• Straight and curved lines
• Constrained (the frame) and unconstrained (the doodle)

Next, extrapolate each pair of opposites into some kind of universal analogy.  Little Suzy’s drawing of a house with the sun in the corner may be meant to be the one she lives in but ART is about how it is an archetype across time, representing the innocence of children, or a universal symbol of a humans seeking comfort (even if you know darn well that houses in Uganda don’t look anything like this.)

For the examples above, here are some of the potential analogies:

• Black vs white
  • Yin and yang
    • Male and female
  • Daylight and darkness

• Straight vs curved lines
  • manufactured and naturally occurring
  • soft (curved) and sharp (straight)
    • peace (soft) and war (sharp)
• Constrained vs unconstrained
  • oceans and land
  • buildings/cities and open country
  • chaos and order

The third step is to pick your favorite from the list as your primary theme of conflict, pick out two or three others that you would really like to work in and think up a few grand adjectives.  Note: it’s a common misconception that multi-syllable words are called for here. There’s no need; it’s more effective to think of sweeping universal words that sum up humanity than how many syllables they have.

Last but not least, sum it all up in a paragraph or two.  This could take a couple of tries and some editing but it’s doable in under a half hour once you get the hang of it.

For example:

The artist’s use of black and white, unrelieved with even a hint of compromising grey, reflects the universal conflict between  men and women; each requiring the other to define itself and yet neither giving ground to the other. They are locked in an eternal struggle for dominance, but if either were to win, both would lose and humanity would cease. And yet together, they represent a completeness that holds infinite potential.

Looking closer, the tangled lines are also representative of the internal conflict we each face in determining our individual purpose and our true path. Yet there is balance to the composition that suggests a centered stability that is both comforting and optimistic.  Within the constrained chaos lies possibility.

Now go out and try it for yourself! It could become a fun and quirky hobby…