Or, to put it another way, on a glorious day as the late afternoon light makes the gum trees shimmer and sunshine drips on your neck like warm honey you just want to kiss the sky and say thank you.
Well, that’s how I see it, anyway.
We’ve had quite a few days like these recently, and I don’t think I’m the only person to feel these things, but we all talk about them in different ways.
I was speaking to a level-headed sort of fellow the other day who talks about fishing trips and business and buildings.
He said these autumn days were just magic.
That was enough for him and I agreed, but I wanted more.
These days are more than magic — they are the days of glorious gold and shimmering warm honey.
They are the sort of days that made Claude Monet paint his haystack series, or Ralph Vaughan Williams compose The Lark Ascending, or helped Orrvale orchardist and beautiful dreamer the late Alan Mathews write his magnificent poem Sunday Afternoon.
The point is, art is a conduit for all those human experiences, so compressed and vivid they can become overwhelming.
Creativity is a good way to untangle these feelings, get them out of your head and throw them back at the world like a rubber ball to bounce off walls and other people.
And because people are complex and diverse beings, their art is not always about beauty.
Sometimes it’s about fear, or outrage or horror, or a niggling dread, or incredulity at human stupidity, or just plain dumbfoundedness at the unknowable universe.
Not all of us have the drive to untangle complex feelings and present them to the world as art, and not many of us can present a cogent analysis of an artist’s work, particularly if it’s dense and abstract.
But we all react to art in some way, even if it’s just to walk off and scratch your head and think, my God, some people are weird.
I have no doubt that’s what some Kimberley tribes people thought of the Wandjina head painters, or other cave dwellers thought of the Lascaux artists.
Today, reactions to art have become so sophisticated that sometimes the language used by experts and critics can be as impenetrable as the art is itself.
So, it was encouraging and inspirational to see someone outside the world of art launch Shepparton Art Museum’s latest exhibition, The Shape of Things to Come, last Friday.
David McKenzie is a level-headed business and buildings sort of bloke, yet he delivered an impassioned and eloquent reaction to the show’s artworks by leading Australian artists including Lin Onus, Penny Byrne, John Perceval and Anne Wenzel.
While much of their vision is dystopian and apocalyptic, it also reflects the beauty and mystery of the world around us.
Mr McKenzie spoke about his personal feelings of uncertainty and dread at the way the world is changing on a political and environmental level, and the way the art on SAM’s walls reflected these changes and made him think more deeply about them.
It was an honest and heartfelt speech, and it was a rebuke to those who think art has nothing to say to them.
Essentially, Mr McKenzie was saying the rubber ball of art is bigger and more than magic, it’s real and it’s quintessentially human.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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