Magical Art

Magical Art

I think the very best the arts can do is to lift us out of the mundane and into the wonderful. Too often I leave a cinema feeling that I been beaten over the head. No matter what the medium, when art lifts us above ourselves it reaches its finest: whether that be in soaring voices, breath-taking cinematography, beautiful words or exquisite painting. Obvious names come to mind: Mozart, Fellini, Michelangelo, Yeats, Shakespeare, Bosch, Leonardo, Bach.

But no need to be quite so classical, so grand: for me Pink Floyd, Brian Eno, Peter Greenaway. Sometimes glimpses of same are stumbled on: that’s how I felt when I first stumbled on Martin Gale’s work.

I maybe a bit behind, but I’ve just stumbled on the work of Ulla Schildt. Originally from Finland but now residing, I believe, in Oslo; she is a graduate of Dublin Institute of Technology. My discovery is in the exhibition Flow, a joint exhibition of art works from the OPW State art collection and the collection of the Department of Finance and Personnel, Northern Ireland, currently on view in the Pearse Museum in Dublin.

The image in question is Water World: a spectacular vision of lush exotic jungle flora (almost cinematic); a child stands gazing at it in some botanical garden. The wonder of the exhibition heightened by the mesmerized child draws the viewer right back to the days of childhood wonderment.

So I found some more of her works on line in which she time and again uses a transfixed child to convey to us the magic of some display of nature.Even in the tiny format employed on the website below, viewers will be interested in the exhibits on display,enchanted by the wonder of the viewing children and themselves transported back to their own childhoods by the magical displays. The images are moving and beautiful.

Visit http://www.foto.no/cgi-bin/articles/articleView.cgi?articleId=39992 and http://www.flickr.com/photos/78025134@N00/2834982711/in/photostream/
to see some examples of her work.