EINFÜHLUNG

I´ve done lots of different jobs before I ever became heavily interested in painting, however I haven´t tried singing yet and in this dream I sort of did. I was at a big family reunion, more like a wedding. I looked more like those musicians you usually see around these streets with their acoustic guitar, very low profile. My uncle and a cousin carefully penned down some songs on a napkin; I swear I could almost see which songs they wanted me to play but as soon as I peeked at it they jealously covered it.

My grandma kept asking me for a song as well; it seems I was solicited that night. However I was very busy, so I could only play any other melody. A girl handed the napkins over and I swear I´ve never seen her in my life; she must have been young, probably six or seven years old. The truth is I did it all for free because the next guy that came along was charging for every goddamn song. So was I doing it for the love of art? Absolutely.

I was still having some mixed feelings about the outcome of the new exhibition, but helping out Edith with her investigations sure distracted me a bit.

She kept a word that progressively went to my unconscious: Einfühlung, a German word which translated means something like aesthetic sympathy or empathy. It was a concept difficult to grasp at the beginning, yet it became much easier if you just saw it happen.

A person gets an immediate reaction to any aesthetic experience, whether it´s beautiful or not. If the object conveys an emotion so powerful then the individual will mirror those feelings. The quickest example would be watching the many representations of Christ. People connect with his pain, but not with the artist who made it. In this new era with fabulous inventions like Expressionism the spectator participates a little bit more in this emotional experience. We want them to connect with us in order to grow spiritually, but as you can see it´s a very ancient practice that wasn´t taken into consideration until a few decades ago.

“Edith, is this gonna take longer?” I asked moaning because I was sort of exhausted and she was still reading in bed.

NOT MUCH LONGER NOW. THANKS FOR HELPING ME OUT. I DON´T KNOW WHERE YOU FIND THE TIME FOR ALL THIS.

“I honestly have no idea…”