DISCIPLE,

My perspective? From a religious point of view, or as an artist?

OR the big question,

"What is ART?"
Why does mankind have this need to "create" or to make a mark?
This is from the very beginnings when people made marks in the sand, in the dirt and then on cave walls, markings on stone to the highest point of skill, understanding and connexion as is revealed in this stature.
It is obviously a need to communicate but to communicate what exactly.

Thousands of words have been written on this by many more learned scholars than I am. More confusing, every artist has their own spin yet sound very similar.
Dare I quote Sister Wendy Beckett, a catholic nun here, from her BBC programme in the 90's;

"I think the experiential test of whether this art is great or good, or minor or abysmal is the effect it has on your own sense of the world and yourself"

Another one from someone else;
.."art is a means of communication by which mind reaches out to mind across great gaps of time and space...."

"Art is a staple of mankind..so urgent, so utterly linked with the pulse of feeling that it becomes the singular sign of life when every other aspect of civilization fails".
Jamake Highwater.

From Henri Matisse;
"In art the genuine creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has arranged for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome" ( this is the practical aspect of art)

My take?
Great art transports the viewer extra-dimensionally to a place of deeper awareness of the whole meaning of existence, the Creation itself, a spiritual experience where time and place recede and the soul is refreshed. In this transportation of the soul all questions are immediately answered and no longer necessary. The artist themselves are in this state when they are working where time and space are meaningless.
So, integrity/truth is to be uppermost if the work of personal creation is to succeed in communicating to the viewer the beauty of the Creation and to truly touch the soul. This is a true religious experience. What you are shown in a great work of art reflects the Creation and
in mankind, heart, mind, soul, body and the spirit.
Whatever an image an artist ends up with, even if it is an ugly distortion (post modernism) it is still only a reflexion or a copy of the world around us.
Nothing man has done or achieved is original even though he/she/it are trying their hardest.

I'd love to quote hitler on art here but won't b tempted...

I love this piece of art very much for all of these qualities and more.... which are noncommunicable in words.

Bless up, judah