This painting started out as one thing and became another, as evident from the description of its photographic and historical origins. In the transfer from idea to the canvas, the image retains a trace of the initial impulse that prompted the painting, but has acquired another, new meaning proper to the visual language of paint.

Your call asked the question: Does Art Enrich Life? Evidently, the answer is very much yes! As for your statement that “the beauty of art is that it takes on significance via the experiences, associations, emotions, and interpretations of those who view and discuss it,” that is also very true, though I would add that the objet d’art itself, independently or at least additionally to the list of factors you name that determine its comprehension and appreciation, also has its own visual impact.

Workers, from the Kuibyshev Chocolate Factory, is based on the photo below taken from a Soviet magazine of the 1980s. The photo shows happy workers taking the sun on their break. The idea of a workers’ paradise was nice but the reality of being a factory hand in Soviet Russia was more complex. One of the Soviet Union’s biggest confectionary factories, the Kuibyshev factory was bought over by the Swiss multinational Nestlé in the Yeltsin era, when Western investors and home-grown oligarchs swooped and hoovered up old Soviet enterprises, causing huge resentment in the country that has partly fuelled Putin’s rise to power.