Is Art About Unknowables?

Thinking about this question I immediately start reflecting on abstract art and color fields.  I think of Paul Jenkins work and the work of current day arts who create work from “poured” colors.  The content of these works is???????  I am not sure.  Beautiful flowing color but does that make it art?  When Paissul Jenkins first introduced the poured color fields he was working in a different time.  The goal of many artists during that time was to find purity to find bliss, to find utopia and present it. 

Jenkins time was trying to identify the mystical source of all things and make it objective.  Artists today are still trying to identify that mystical source that comes from no where they claim and just is there.  They have made very little progress in finding that special kind of unknowable so they link this unknowable to their feelings.  How they feel about a work of art? 

Feelings do very little when it comes to the progress of knowing something – for they are individual and unique.  Perhaps subjective feelings are the largest gulf between objectively knowing something and art, so how can art be objectively know.  How can we begin to make progress in the aesthetic of knowing what art is and the forever idea that art is just based on feeling?

A good starting place might be does the work and the artist present a sense of life?  A sense of life has endless possibilities – including color fields that in the past have come from a search for the unknowable. Perhaps the color fields of today come from that which an artist knows, their foundation and their sense of life.  The joy of the birth of something.

Featured image: "Radishes II"  11x15. Watercolor, Acrylic on Paper.  Artist Christine Alfery