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Broken Wall

© Joe Jeskiewicz

Perhaps you have been misled. This article isn't about breaking down the institutional walls of art as we know it. It isn't about smashing barriers of social injustice with intrusive or glaring art. It isn't about frightening the muralists into believing their artwork is in danger. It's just about a broken wall.

Sometimes the art we do is based not on great events in history or personal tragedy but on things we see around us. This is purely the case of this exercise. I happened to see a dilapidated old wall falling down and stored those words in my mind to approach at a later date. Well the time has come and I can't remember what the wall looked like in the least. So the exercise was left to my imagination. And I imagined more than one kind of broken wall.

A wall is anything that comes between two objects or separates two rooms. This is my definition, not the definition of any dictionary or encyclopedia. A wall is a simple thing with may complicated shapes and textures. When we take that wall and break it apart there is a joining of ideas. The ideas and colors and sounds and smells of one room invade the like of the other room and vice versa. They mix and sometimes the mix is volatile.

When we break down a wall there is some energy involved. Some force is applied to the wall to make it fall. Sometimes we use explosions to break down walls. Sometimes we are methodical and patient when we destroy a wall brick by brick one speck at a time. And in the end the wall comes down and we are presented with a new situation and a new view on life.

Take this example I have provided you. One wall has come down, the obvious physical one. Another wall is being worked on, the wall between two people that we can't see. I just wanted to experiment with my skills in Corel a little on this one. So I sketched out the scene on paper and transferred it by eye into CorelDraw. In the image the dominant objects are the people and wall. The background is somewhat incomplete basically because it isn't as important for the image.

I feel that I was exploring a dichotomy of ideas in this single image, an obvious link to the title and a symbolic link to the title. So this is your exercise to think about for the week. And as an extra challenge for your creative minds, see if you two can fit 2 or more ideas into the image that relate to the title, the more the better.

Broken Wall

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