
This article was published in the May 2015 issue of Nashville Arts Magazine
by Rachael McCampbell
It’s amazing to think that visual and sculptural arts were around almost 30,000 years before the first language was recorded. Humans have always possessed an inherent need to express ourselves through art. Before the majority of the world could read, or the invention of the printing press, visual art was often the platform used to illustrate stories and communicate ideas to the masses (think of medieval narrative paintings of Biblical stories by Cimabue and Giotto and, later, cartoons). Art commissioned by the Catholic Church lead to private commissions by wealthy patrons of portraits, neoclassical themes, and scenes of ordinary life. Romanticism of the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries opened the doors for artists to express what they wanted to paint—their personal thoughts, observations, and feelings. This was a pivotal change that lead to all the “isms” and art movements we have today: Impressionism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Constructivism, Minimalism, Neo-expressionism, along with Installation, Performance, and Conceptual Art, to name a few. Continue reading I Was Here: A Look At Why We Create