writing about art

Been working with students taking a course I teach called "senior exhibition" (Art 4192)which is a capstone course for BFA majors. A lot of writing about art is required. Interesting how detached the process of writing about art can be when it really should be a most integrated thing to do as artist, an introspective process, a verbal bridge from the viewer to access the work of art.

"My theory is that the purpose of art is to transmit universal truths of a sort, but of a particular sort, that in art, whether it's poetry, fiction or painting, you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition. And so what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply to validate the human experience and to tell people the deep human truths which they already unconsciously know."Walker Percy