The Language of Art

A personal essay by Ashley Hayes

“There are two distinct languages. There is the verbal, which separates people… and there is the visual that is understood by everybody.” - Yaacov Agam.

They used to say I’d be the next Picasso. I wasn’t actually an exceptionally good artist - adults just tend to say cliche things like that when any kid has an ounce of prospective talent in them. Although I had no desire to be anything like Picasso - no one’s face actually looks like that Picasso, come on - comments like that really made me proud, maybe even a bit too proud. Now, I might not have appreciated Picasso's work, but I wish I would have realized earlier that at least his work had something to say; at least it made me feel something (even if it was a feeling of disgust). My doodles of Disney characters and my abysmal block lettering couldn’t make anyone feel anything, even if they were especially good for someone my age.



All my life, I had enjoyed drawing, doodling, painting, crafting - the whole shebang. And although I was pretty good at it, all it had ever been to me was a hobby. Maybe if I was being generous I could call it a ‘passion.’ But it wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I learned that art is it’s own language - a language that people around the world of any race or nationality can understand. That is, my friends, because art is a language in which words aren’t necessary.

I think the reason it took me so long to discover the language of art was because I wasn’t trying to speak to anyone in the first place. Everything I created was much less a creation and more of a copy of something that already existed - word for word, stroke for stroke. I was a skilled copier, and nothing more. But that all changed in my senior year of high school when I took an AP art class. I had to create a portfolio with a theme and 24 pieces of art. Real art. Original art. Art that could speak to people.

If you know me, you know that I talk a lot. But unfortunately, I’m not very skilled at expressing myself. So when the spoken word begins to fail me, (which it often does), I choose to turn to the written word. It’s much easier for me to express myself through words that can be carefully thought out and hand crafted. But when the written word also begins to fail me (which it sometimes does) and my pen hovers speechless over a blank page, I trade that blank page in for a blank canvas and give one more form of expression a try - one without words or even rules.

 I was excited to get started, but my excitement faded the more my realization grew that perhaps I’d never had an original thought in my entire life. How could that be? I stared at the blank canvas, itching to begin, and for once, it was hard. It was hard because I couldn’t just dive in with a stroke of color here and there, playing Simon Says on a piece of paper, competing with myself to see how much my masterpiece could look just like someone else’s masterpiece. Oh how that blank canvas frightened me. And excited me. It frightened me because I finally had a chance to say something. It frightened me because I didn’t know what I wanted to say or how I would say it.

I leaned over the canvas, my paintbrush hovering just millimeters from the stretched surface, begging to surrender some of its color, to transfer some life to that empty, lifeless rectangle. I drew in a breath, leaned back, and set the paintbrush down with a sigh. In the process, I managed to get paint on my hands and the table, but the canvas remained blank and unforgiving. That wasn’t a sigh of defeat, by the way. It was a sigh of surrender. Surrender to the white canvas. I wasn’t going to be so hasty this time; I knew I would have to be careful if I wanted to create something that would make observers feel something - really feel something. I chuckled to myself as I realized an interesting yet satisfying truth: I would rather someone have a passionate hate for my artwork than to shrug and say ‘it’s not bad.’ At least hate was a strong emotion. I wanted to persuade those hidden feelings to come on out, to show themselves.

I wondered why this was all of a sudden so hard. I had never been so teased, so taunted by an empty canvas before. Then it dawned on me: I knew I wanted my art to speak to people. The trouble was I didn’t know what message I wanted to share. I had these ideas in my head, somewhere between an audible thought and an image, but not quite one or the other.  The more my imagination gave life to those ideas, the more I wished to give those ideas a home where everyone could see them, explore them, maybe even enter my world a little bit - see things the way I do, speak my language, if you will.

This language inside of me didn’t have a name. It was desperate to express itself, but I never seemed to have words to give the language the escape it so desperately desired. But it’s cage wasn’t an insufficient amount of verbal sounds and phrases - it was a lack of visual expressibility. The way to set this unspoken language free was through the careful mix of colors, the gentle strokes, the rough edges, the precisely designed lines - for it was a language exceeding words, a language understood by many but spoken by none, a language I wanted to learn, a language I wanted to tame.

This realization helped me pick my topic for my portfolio: perspective. I wanted to give people a different perspective on concepts that are hard to visualize. Maybe that way I could speak words often left unspoken, words not easily understood through verbal communication. It’s ironic to think that sometimes, the more I talk, the less I’m understood. But it was time they understood.

In the process of trying to take something from my brain and plaster it onto a flat surface, my imagination teased me. It was full of images that felt vivid and clear, images that made sense. But as soon as I tried to manifest them in some visual, universally understood way, the images melted away, and it felt as if I was trying to remember a strange dream that I had awoken from a little too early to make any sense of. The thoughts and the ideas slipped through my fingers like sand, and I was desperate to find a way to control them.

I distinctly remember the first time I felt I had begun to speak that sought after, unspoken language. I was trying to show what it felt like inside my head when I listened to music. This time, as I leaned over the canvas once more, I was prepared. The image existed in my head already, all it needed now was representation. Let me tell you, spilling out parts of your brain onto a piece of paper is harder than you’d think, and scarier, too. It’s messy, hard to control, and nearly impossible to organize. I started with a silhouette of a man’s head wearing silver headphones - that was the easy part. From the edges of the headphones were intense bursts of colors - each color had a different pattern and represented a different part of the music. Blue streaks, with tendrils winding around each other, depicted the smooth sound of the singer's voice. Sharp, red streaks protruding from the edges, portrayed the funky, bold notes being plucked from the electric guitar. It wasn’t until I swirled my paintbrush through the purple paint that I realized I was doing it, I mean, I was really doing it! Letting those feelings, those languageless words out of their cage felt so incredibly liberating.

Now they could all see what I was talking about (or failing to talk about). This was it. This is what listening to music looked like in my head. My pride faltered as I wondered if they would understand. Would they see that and shout: “Yes! Finally! Someone did it! Someone was able to express to me through colors, lines, strokes, and shapes what it’s like to listen to music!” ? Or would they see it and wonder why a bunch of oddly shaped colors were protruding from the silver orb in the middle of some dude’s head? Then it dawned on me that it didn’t matter. (That’s when I started appreciating Picasso. He didn’t care if people ‘got it.’)

Each piece after that came easier than the last. I started exploring different mediums - different aspects of the language. I created this piece entitled ‘Two Face.’ On one side, I drew a simplistic version of half my face and what I looked like on the outside. The other half of the face was a skull filled with a collage of words I had found in magazines to describe myself. As I furiously flipped through the pages and snipped anything that spoke to me, I realized maybe words weren’t so bad after all. 

After that, I tried creating another piece, using words once more. What if I could enhance my visual language with words from the spoken language? The spoken language doesn’t have to separate people if it’s supported by a language that is understood more universally. That idea led me to start my next piece entitled ‘Headache.’ I wanted to show what that overwhelming feeling looked like - that feeling when so many thoughts and words and ideas are crammed into your head that they don’t all fit and you think your head is going to burst. With an overwhelming array of bright colors and wild fonts, I was able to turn words into art. Using the two together gave my art strength, and it was the key to opening that cage that ensnared that unspoken language that was just beginning to find its sweet, sweet release.

Art is a language, and a complicated one at that. It can be spoken in many ways, understood and interpreted in many more. Each piece has something different to say. Maybe it’s not understood at first, or maybe not even until a feeble attempt is given to explain it. But that’s how languages work, right? It didn’t matter if my artwork spoke to people in the way I had intended. At least it had spoken. And it spoke in so many more ways, and in so many more dynamics, than I ever could have. I had managed to speak a language understood by everybody, and that’s what I really desired.

"White Birdcage" by Deleece Cook https://unsplash.com/@deleece [Public domain via Unspalsh]
"Brown Wooden Table With White Wall" by Justyn Warner https://unsplash.com/@justynwarner [Public domain via Unspalsh]
"Three Silver Paintbrushes on White Textile" by Anna Kolosyuk https://unsplash.com/@anko_ [Public domain via Unspalsh]