by Youngbear Roth

Created on: April 04, 2010   Last Updated: May 21, 2010

I will paraphrase a line - originally eight hours long and void of punctuation - from 'Gertrude Stein's Lectures in America' where she said, the greatest paintings are those paintings that come from life and whose painting continues off the edges of the canvas.

Continuing off the edge of the canvas is critically important to interpreting art, because it intimates that art and what the viewer brings to the work of art in question affects all of life.

Artistic process is not separate from life. Any artist will tell us that a painting is incomplete until it has a viewer to complete the process. The inspiration for art, the execution of art, the viewing and interpretation of art does not take place in a vacuum. Realized from a universal viewpoint, art interpretation is an integral part of humankind's circle of life. Interpreting aesthetics that are so much a part of human dynamics for such expressive beings is a responsibility in understanding truth; how truth uplifts, or devastates, constructs or destroys. Truth is interpretive, not absolute. We can judge a case two ways and both can be the truth. Both truths carry a responsibility for the consequences ensued. It gets sticky – which truth do we choose? The effects of one's perceived truth, if it is told, and if so, how it is communicated, must come from a place of compassion, the will to aid in the common good.

'Guernica', painted by Pablo Picasso for the 1937 World's Fair in Paris, is black, blue , and white. The canvas is eleven feet tall and twenty-five and a half feet wide. It comes from a life experience, though it is an abstracted expression of that experience, and to keep Gertrude happy it runs off the edges without punctuation into that life it came from. But what is the truth? Which life experience did it come from and where does it run to when it leaves the canvas?

Coming from a long line of artists, and having been a painter for many years, I could do a passable job of discussing color theory, composition, and throw in a little symbolism. However, taking in the artistic process that is 'Guernica', the fact of its existence, its hanging in physical space seems to be inconsequential. To interpret 'Guernica' is knowing the truth of where it came from and where it is going; we already know it's alive.

'Guernica' grows from three truths. First, the popular and one might say commercial truth. 'Guernica' brings the terrors of war toe to toe with the people. It is a blatantly manipulative piece backing

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