Opposites Attract, by Lughan

Image: Oppo­sites Attract, cour­tesy of Doc­tor Swan

Editor’s note: this arti­cle was orig­i­nally sent to me as an email-reply to my pre­vi­ous arti­cle “The Law of Bal­ance”. I asked the author (Lughan, a fas­ci­nat­ing and tal­ented artist — most famous for being my Mum) if she would be com­fort­able with me trans­lat­ing it from our native Span­ish and then pub­lish­ing it in this space. Luck­ily for us she agreed. The effort to trans­late & edit her orig­i­nal let­ter is now fin­ished and ready for your read­ing plea­sure. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

- The crazy Colombian

The best lessons come from experiences

I was intrigued by your treat­ment of oppo­sites in your arti­cle ‘The Law of Bal­ance’, so I decided to send you this let­ter. Although you approach the topic from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive than mine, I found a lot of com­mon ground with some of the val­ues & prin­ci­ples that I have embraced through­out my life. In my opin­ion, the polar­ity that arises from oppo­site ends of the spec­trum is con­stant within our human con­di­tion; I have there­fore devoted some time to study­ing it and under­stand­ing it.

All my stud­ies and teach­ings on this topic were mere con­cepts until the sum­mer of 1989, when I expe­ri­enced the Law of Oppo­sites (a corol­lary to the law of Bal­ance) dur­ing my sec­ond concert-exhibition in Bogota, Colom­bia. Before I get to that story, I would like to share some of the events that pre­ceded that impor­tant moment in my life.

The evo­lu­tion of art into the 21st century

From a very early age I learned to play the piano, and I gave my first pro­fes­sional con­cert on April of 1986. Despite my exten­sive train­ing, I soon realised I needed more than just music to thrive as an artist, so I started exper­i­ment­ing with other media. I wrote (fic­tion as well as non-fiction); took some lessons in how to paint; and learned to sculpt. Through­out this period, I also exper­i­mented with water­colours, mixed media, and teach­ing (I gave art his­tory lessons for adults at my local com­mu­nity centre).

At some point in this jour­ney, I reflected on the lack of multi-dimensional per­spec­tives present on most tra­di­tional forms of art. Some would argue this is false. After all, all painters use tech­niques in per­spec­tive that will make any paint­ing feel three-dimensional. Sim­i­larly, audio­philes will argue that music is sensed three-dimensionally when expe­ri­enced at a con­cert hall , as opposed to the more two-dimensional expe­ri­ence we have while lis­ten­ing it through our iPods. Yet most artists con­fine them­selves to one medium, and develop deep exper­tise on it. It is this deep spe­cial­i­sa­tion that leads to what I call one-dimensionality.

With this in mind, I started ask­ing myself some tough ques­tions: Can an artist be good enough across a cou­ple of dis­ci­plines to cre­ate an enrich­ing and truly multi-media artis­tic expe­ri­ence? What would hap­pen if I put in a paint­ing my emo­tional reac­tion to the music I play in the piano? There was no other way to know but to give it a try. I always had told my son that I would love for him to become an astro­naut, and explore the depths of space no one else has ever touched. In a way, I saw myself play­ing an equiv­a­lent role; the lonely artist that would explore the depths of mix­ing vastly dif­fer­ent arts such as music, paint­ing, and sculpture.

After about a year of trial and error I felt I was ready to per­form in front of a pub­lic, and my first concert-exhibition was sched­uled for the 16th of April, 1986 in my native Bogota.

So what exactly is a concert-exhibition?

It is a multi-art expe­ri­ence that is hinged around two tra­di­tional artis­tic per­for­mances: A con­cert and an exhi­bi­tion. In my case, the con­cert came in the form of a piano recital, dur­ing which I used a slide-projector (yes, the old-fashioned type!) to show pho­tos of the paint­ings or sculp­tures that were inspired by my feel­ings whilst per­form­ing that par­tic­u­lar piece. The exhi­bi­tion came in two shapes: the afore­men­tioned dis­play of photo-slides dur­ing the con­cert (call it a pre­view of the real thing); and a for­mal exhi­bi­tion of my art after the con­cert was finished.

At the age of 41 I was a concert-exhibition vir­gin. That all changed that year when I per­formed 27 pieces com­posed by Schu­mann, Debussy and Vil­lalo­bos. After receiv­ing encour­age­ment from my audi­ence, I decided to repeat this type of con­cert three years later. On this sec­ond occa­sion I per­formed the 24 pre­ludes by Chopin, and a series of 24 paint­ings inspired in each of those musi­cal masterpieces.

Chopin’s 24 pre­ludes: A study of polar­ity by a time­less musician

Why did I choose these pieces by Chopin for my sec­ond concert-exhibition? Part of it was due to the fact that of the 24 pieces, exactly half are dynamic, light, and writ­ten in an open mood; whilst the other half are darker, some­times very quiet and at times very agres­sive, but always dra­matic. Inter­est­ingly, the order of the 24 pre­ludes makes it a unit in which a light piece is fol­lowed by a dark piece, which is then fol­lowed by a light piece, and so on. Actu­ally the 24 pre­ludes were com­posed in the 24 keys that exist in music, and the 12 major keys cor­re­spond to the lighter pieces whereas the 12 minor keys cor­re­spond to the dra­matic ones. The pat­tern Chopin estab­lished (thus empha­siz­ing human polar­ity with music) was that of a major scale fol­lowed by a minor scale, and so on.

On this basis, I painted 24 land­scapes, of which 12 were full of light and move­ment, and the other 12 were dra­matic in dif­fer­ent ways. A part of me res­onated strongly with this polar­ity, as I felt through this col­lec­tion of music & paint­ing that I was explor­ing the entirety of my soul, from my dark­est thoughts and moments, to my hap­pi­est ones.

A dif­fi­cult lesson

After the con­cert was com­pleted, we (as usual) invited the audi­ence to enjoy the orig­i­nal paint­ings on an exhi­bi­tion hall adjunct to the con­cert hall. It was in these moments that my big learn­ing arrived. I was sur­prised (almost hurt) by people’s reac­tions. In truth I should not have been sur­prised, but real­ity is that I was taken back dramatically.

What was the public’s reac­tion? They all loved the 12 pieces that were full of light and move­ment; yet at the same time they rejected (in quite strong ways) the darker pieces. Hav­ing approached the paint­ing of the land­scapes as an exer­cise on self-portraiture, I was deeply hurt by both the com­ments and the buy­ing pat­terns of my audi­ence. To some extent, I felt rejected, aban­doned, lonely. Their sim­plis­tic reac­tions showed me that no one had really under­stood how much of my soul I had put into them. They ALL were self-portraits; and the rejec­tion of half of my paint­ings made me feel like they only accepted me when I was at my best; and rejected me when I was not.

It was at this time that I truly realised the real­ity of the Law of Oppo­sites. I under­stood why is it so hard for us to find love; to find hap­pi­ness whilst liv­ing in a dif­fer­ent coun­try with a dif­fer­ent cul­ture; or to develop deep, long-lasting friend­ships. We often fall in love with the lighter side of peo­ple: the happy boyfriend; the com­pas­sion­ate hus­band; the devoted lover. It is only human to fall in love with those char­ac­ters, as they are easy to love. Yet when the same per­son sud­denly morphs into the oppo­site, we find it dif­fi­cult to accept that it is the same per­son, and we start ques­tion­ing our love. It is unavoid­able that we will sud­denly expe­ri­ence a moment when our part­ner is at the depths of his depres­sion; at the height of his anger; or in the mid­dle of a con­fus­ing moment that may lead him astray; and it is in these moments that we reject him for what he did to us. And in that split sec­ond, we decide that we can not love that per­son anymore.

Yet for us to find true love, we need to accept that our part­ner will be full of con­tra­dic­tions; that we will expe­ri­ence both his lighter and his darker side. For us to find true love, we need to appre­ci­ate his pos­i­tive traits, whilst accept­ing his neg­a­tive ones. To find true love, it is essen­tial to com­mu­ni­cate our appre­ci­a­tion for the good things our part­ner does for us, whilst con­struc­tively explain­ing the impact that have those not-so-good things he often does with­out even real­is­ing that he hurt us.

It is not hard then to see that it is in this bal­anced appre­ci­a­tion and accep­tance of all aspects of our part­ners’ self that True Love finds its source; that as long as we con­tinue to judge other peo­ple, other coun­tries, other cul­tural, social, polit­i­cal, or reli­gious groups from a per­spec­tive of polar­ity (“I am right, you are wrong”), we will con­tinue to fail in cre­at­ing a bet­ter world for our children.

It is not sur­pris­ing that after this epiphany, my next artis­tic expe­ri­ence was to write a book. Can you guess the title? Go here* to find out.

*Dis­claimer: If you fol­low the Ama­zon link above and pur­chase the book, the owner of this blog will receive a small por­tion from the sales of the book via the Ama­zon Asso­ciate pro­gram; your sup­port of our efforts to keep this mag­a­zine free are greatly appreciated!