Art can be manifested in various types and forms, with every person finding something unique and close in a particular art type. Some individuals find their utmost relaxation in listening to music while others enjoy reading or visiting art galleries in their free time. As for me, whereas I have much experience with music and am quite comfortable with visual art, I find understanding literature rather challenging.
My rich experience with music has developed due to my attending the school choir and music school. My grandma used to play piano for me when I was little, and I have loved music subconsciously since very early years. I appreciate opera and ballet, as well as modern performers’ songs – music helps me to feel well and allows to distract from stressful events. For example, I always attend “The Nutcracker” ballet during the holiday season since it is extremely festive and uplifting. In its turn, visual art is not my favorite, but I am quite okay with it. I can even go to an exhibition with friends occasionally. However, with the pandemic regulations, the last few things I saw were online ones. Last week, I got acquainted with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam collection, which I liked a lot.
Finally, understanding literature is the most complicated task for me. I do enjoy reading, but I never tend to choose books or stories with twisted plots or a large number of characters. I love landscape descriptions in the books much more than dialogues. Also, I was always puzzled when a teacher gave the task “to analyze something in the book/poem” or, even worse, “to guess what the author meant.” Hence, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, which seems boring to some of my friends, is one of my most favorite books. The book contains many descriptions: the sea, the house, and the man’s appearance are given much attention. Meanwhile, the author does not mean his characters to speak much. This could probably be linked to my love for music and visual arts: the descriptive parts in books are close to these elements. Therefore, my perception of art is largely creative but not analytical: in all three types, I tend to prefer visual and audio impressions rather than analyze something that is not on the surface.