In my post on 2 June I touched on the question of the problem of deciding what a picture means. Last night I had an interesting conversation that added a new twist to that problem.
I was eating in a restaurant with a group from the wider family (actually, to celebrate my grandson Zack’s christening). The people I was sitting with were all from military backgrounds, and I was very much taken by their accounts of the lives of military families. It confirmed my earlier impression that, for the rest of us, this experience is pretty impenetrable. In many respects this really is a world of its own.
Then I began to relate this to my experience of designing the memorial windows for the Defence Academy. The figures in these windows are all facing away from the viewer. We try to share their state of mind, in looking at the windows, but it seems that we can never see how they are actually experiencing separation, loss and death. We never actually see their faces.
This is not a level of meaning I had entertained in creating the design, but I’m happy to adopt it as one level in the “real” meaning of what I have done. Art goes on adding meaning (and perhaps losing it also) long after it is made.