The Art of the Most Important Book that Influenced My Writing
Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light by Leonard Shlain
We have all read books that made us think (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings), find contentment (The Tao of Pooh), or touched our soul (The Alchemist) however, one book brought it all together for me in the art genre: Art & Physics, Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light by Leonard Shlain. I was 24, living in San Francisco, getting my Master of Fine Arts from the Academy of Art University when my art history professor assigned this book. At first, I was disappointed to have to read about Physics, as I wanted to solely focus on art. Little did I know the disciplines of art and physics are connected. This book made me stop trying to live in a small niche of art but to embrace art as a part of the whole cultural package. I know we all have been told this before that “nothing exists in a vacuum” but I at that time wished it did in art.
Art and physics are disciplines that have no words. Only images and numbers are at their disposal. Without words the truth needs to be told in different languages and in this regard the two disciplines face the same challenge. In Art & Physics the author, Leonard Shlain, takes the reader through the breakthroughs in art and physics side by side and I for one was amazed. Although I have not read the book in years, I remember a chapter on Cezanne, Picasso, and Cubism where there was an abandonment of a single viewpoint where objects are broken apart and reassembled at angles that show them from different perspectives. This cubist style examines objects as a sum of their parts rather than as a whole. Einstein also mirrored this development in physics and in relativity he is credited for saying the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Other parallels of how artistic breakthroughs have foreshadowed the discovery of scientists fill the pages of this interesting and colorful narrative.
Art & Physics influenced my writing process to combine art with other cultural disciplines and is now my template in writing comparative non-fiction art history books. I plan to write about two significant artists of a given country and explore how their art influenced and paralleled the culture. Art does not exist in a vacuum- I am a believer now! In my first book Warhol, Dr. Seuss and the Making of America, their art reinforced Americans skepticism of what had been widely accepted cultural values in the 1950s and the acceptance and formation of new ones in the 1960s. I am currently working on my next book Van Gogh, Rembrandt and the Making of The Netherlands. Trying to discover cultural links and parallels for the two artists as they lived about 250 years apart, is exciting yet challenging. The research begins and I take a lesson from the book Art & Physics to examine the interconnectedness of art to all aspects of life and culture!