Random ART thoughts... ish...

So over and over again I hear this “I used to ______, but I don’t anymore.  I’m not sure what happened but I (a) got going to college (b) started working a serious job or (c) had kids.”

Fill in the blank, painting, drawing, music, singing, writing or whatever.  Now I hear “well I wasn’t that good”, and implication that there was not a financial future in it. Sometimes this is explicitly stated. Now based on these typical statements I glean two simple internal understandings. One, making Art was not a priority and had to give way to the “real” or “adult” world.  Second, it was ended due to a lack of perceived competence but often underlying that, a perceived inability to make this financially worthwhile. This lack of financial gain seems to flow back to lesson one, it is not congruent with the “adult” world.

Now this said, I can disagree with the conception that Art belongs to another class that can somehow escape the constraints of the adult world. And meeting full time artists (especially painters for some reason) reinforces that they are a little “off” in a fun way.  There is an archetype in our culture of the “eccentric artist” and while I don’t think fits the majority of artists I have met, captures this idea of not being in the mainstream if one is an artist.

I agree that art, as an encounter with beauty and a non-rational attempt to create meaning, is a step out of our general way of working.  It breaks away from the mundane, wake up work wash sleep rinse repeat.  It is this encounter of art that allows us to understand things we don’t like, that challenge us, as art all the same.  It allows that art can be a simple few lines deemed poetic, a photograph that isolates something from the everyday world and therefore elevates it, pornography, or the singing of an ancient tune.  It steps us out of our normal understanding, at times by grounding us back into a normal typical experience that you usually fail to really “experience”.

Yet we have herds of people that “gave it up”. These people I encounter are defending against a sense that they were not a real artist, that perhaps there work was not meaningful. I believe they know that pretending art could not be a part of their “adult” life is a rationalization to cover a fear.  I base this one the experience of this very encounter. The flash of joy in the eyes when recalling a time when they used to ___. It is an experience that is not so distant.

Life is too painful and meaningless if left to its own course to not create or participate in Art. To give up old experiences is to create walls around who you are. It is to reject that period of life as “not me” and in some ways as “childish experimentation”. This is an artificial moratorium on your identity.  Further it begs the question of what one is teaching the children in your life about what it means to be a whole person.  Oddly enough (or perhaps inevitable) I encounter the middle aged or late middle aged adult.  The one that is painting again, singing again, writing again… or found a new venue for a different art. That spot in development when one looks back to judge ones accomplishments and for these people, they found themselves lacking and falling short. They rectified this by returning to creativity.