Though the images presented here contain no words in themselves, indeed portray wordless experience, my purpose in this blog is to learn from others and to teach them by putting words together to point to the experience we call Art. You might have read a little about me and my art in the statement and brief bio, but there is more to the story. I hope this post and more auto-bio-artistico journal entries to follow will be useful and inspiring to you. My name is John Klingler, and in the spirit of passing on what I have learned so far, I want to share some thoughts and intuitions about art–about the process, the idea of it, its meaning, its purpose, and so on.
Art reflects and expresses a worldview, and this is partly why it is one of my favorite subjects. I still own a drawing that my parents saved from when I was four. Since that young age, I have felt a connected to art, finding it to be a large part of my core identity. When you draw or paint, a recognition about how you are seeing and looking comes about, and it forever changes you. It is magical. It is as if you can’t help but revel in the sense of sight, in the act of perceiving through this miraculous sensory apparatus.
When you see the Milky Way in the night sky, you see the edge of our galaxy. Your eyes receive and sense waves of light radiating from stars somewhere around a thousand light-years away. Your eyes see those stars in a human way, from a human perspective, with a body made up of elements contained in stars. The boundaries of your sensory apparatus extend to the stars. How could one not feel connected to them?