The Ways In Which Art Touches Us

Artwork my dad made of a skeleton on the lid of a metal box

    Classence talks in his book, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch, about the ways in which art can be tactile. He talks about how paintings can be tactile, but so can poetry. I have never thought about touch in this way before. Whenever I think about touch, I always imagine that it can only be felt through the fingertips, the skin, or other places on the body. I had never thought about your eyes or your ears experiencing a kind of touch. The more I think about it, though, the more I agree.

I have been a storyteller and a writer for as long as I can remember, and most recently I have focused more on poetry than any other form of writing. I do really think that it’s because of its, in a sense, “tactile” nature. I love the ways in which poetry and alliteration can sound as you speak it, like Classence even talks about. The way a poem and the words I say sound specifically does mean a lot to me. I won’t ban certain words from my vocabulary like Louis IX did, but I do have very critical opinions about certain sounds, and which ones sound better than others. It’s strange and quite ironic, however, that one of my least favorite sounds is a hard g. And I say it’s ironic because of the fact that my last name is Garrett, which starts with a hard g. I controversially prefer to say “jif” over “gif” just because I hate the hard g sound, and I don’t care if I’m shunned for it. 

My mom is an acrylic painter. Watching her paint and painting with her was always such a tactile experience. I am an artist like her, but I mostly sketch and I’ve learned how to draw realistically as well, (but I haven’t drawn in a very long time, though, so who knows if I’ve still got it). I remember struggling so much with painting in comparison to sketching with a pencil or pen because it sometimes felt like the paintbrush had a mind of its own. It would act different, too, depending on what medium you were using. Watercolor was the most difficult to work with out of all of them. It would run away from you. Art depends on you working with it, not controlling it. 

The most tactile art forms of all I would say is one similar to what my dad specializes in: metalworking. He is like a sculptor, but his medium isn’t clay or marble, but instead metal. He makes art and jewelry that’s scorching hot at one point and cold to the touch at another. He still utilizes the ancient casting method of sand-casting, where he places an object that he found somewhere between two densely packed sheets of special clay-like sand and then pours molten bronze into the crevice that has been formed to create a piece of artwork. Many artists prefer not to work with sand-casting anymore because it is less precise and the sand will often leave little dents or punctures from air bubbles in the solid bronze. Those flaws, however, are exactly why my dad keeps going back to sand-casting. There’s something so natural and beautiful about the bumps and holes throughout a piece that’s been sand-cast.

There’s a perfection about the imperfections in art. The softness or roughness of a material, the cold or warmth of a surface: it is all art in of itself. We physically touch the materials around us, manipulate them into artwork, and they, in turn, touch us emotionally.