National visual art gallery trip

Unlike usual lecture which we spend our time learning in class, we went for a field trip at the National Visual Art Gallery on 26th of February. There were many different kinds of paintings and sculptures. However, I've found that I love those paintings that brings a doom and sorrow feeling to me.

One of those amazing paintings that really caught my eyes was the After Dawn II by Yusri Sulaiman (2013). It was a painting of an old man in the middle of the sea. The entire drawing was in dark blue colour, including the old man's face. He looks tired and at the same time plaintive. Despite his face which was expressionless, his eyes successfully stirred up my emotions. He looked like he was trying to tell me a story, he was trying to beg me for something. However, after starring at the painting for some time, my attention was eventually, being fully attracted towards the old man's eyes. Unlike the previous feelings, I suddenly felt that the old man's eyes was actually revealing a heavy sense of resentment as if he had been experiencing something really sad and bad in his life. Those experiences must have been really depressing and traumatic that caused his eyes to look that fierce but pitiful.

To reflect this painting on myself, at that period of time, my friends and I were having some conflicts among us. The experience of fighting against each other or even having cold war with one another is actually very saddening and frustrating. However, this kind of incident tends to happen between human beings frequently. As friends are always with each other, sometimes people start to notice some irritating qualities that they didn't see before. Instead of tolerating with each other, people always thinks that only they themselves are doing the right things and therefore, they put up a fight. There are quite a lot of examples which friends are no longer friends with each other after this kind of fights. It is consider quite doubtful for me that, is there any pair or group of friends out there are inseparable throughout their whole lives.    

Despite being inspirational, art also plays a significant role in the medical field. Art therapy is being used broadly in dealing with mental and also physical illness. It provides a different form of communication between patients and therapists. Over the years, there have been a lot of successful cases which patients were being healed by using this therapy. Therefore, I feel that the art stream is very important that should be exposed more in Malaysia. How to expose? To begin with, we must first start from ourselves, we should start telling our friends around us about the amazement of arts. How amazing our lives would be with the existence of ART!