To me, paintings largely reflect one person’s perspective on an event. I feel that they also serve a single fixed meaning or aesthetic. I normally don’t like paintings, but when we went to the Louvre, I couldn’t help but admire the various paintings we saw there.
I find myself drawn to physical objects and machines rather than paintings. I appreciate art periodically, but if you had a choice between a painting of a battle or various items used in said battle, what would you want to look at?
I’d pick the collection of items, personally. There’s something about physical objects that I prefer to paintings. I think history is more alive when you can see something from the given time period, whether it be a sword or other weapon, or a collection of building fragments. They weren’t made to be looked at, but to be used and relied upon. That sense of purpose speaks to me in a way flat canvases don’t.
Paintings can tell clear, cut-and-dry stories, but artifacts invite questions and imagination to how an item was used. To me, physical objects make the past more tangible. It’s one thing to look at a depiction of an event, but another to see something that was used during it.
It’s not just items that interest me, but old industrial buildings that were turned into museums that interest me. The Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark (active from 1882 to 1971) in Birmingham , Alabama, the Georgia State Railroad Museum in Savannah (former Central of Georgia Railway shops and terminal), and the Fireman’s Hall Museum (restored 1902 firehouse) in Philadelphia among other places are interpretations of industrial, municipal and transportation history. Previously active sites where the primary structures act as museum artifacts in addition to the collections housed within. They also serve to educate the public through site-based immersion rather than traditional museum exhibits
I am also drawn to the engineering, craftsmanship and purpose behind things. I also like knowing how things worked, so seeing machines, or cross-sections of them, is naturally interesting to me. I am a largely spatial person as well, so scale, texture and the form of something is more impactful to me rather than a flat image.
