The Human Condition

Sometimes, art can give us insights, perspectives, and inspiration we never would have expected.

René Magritte created a collection of four paintings called The Human Condition. I’m not going to pretend to be some fancy art expert by any stretch, but I was intrigued by the paintings nonetheless. They all four follow a similar theme. Here is the first in the series.

René said of this painting:

In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape. Which is how we see the world, namely, outside of us; although having only one representation of it within us. Similarly we sometimes remember a past event as being in the present. Time and space lose meaning and our daily experience becomes paramount. This is how we see the world. We see it outside ourselves, and at the same time we only have a representation of it in ourselves.

I stared at this painting a long time. 🙂 

Until next week.

(All written content created the old-fashioned way.)