i've noticed most people on my "links" list have updated lately, so i felt guilty and here i am, typing.
i really don't have much to say that i haven't already said. as far as life's events and decisions go, we're still playing the waiting game.
so onto something that i can think and dream about no matter where we are or what we get paid for.
i need to get back into art.
i have this hidden passion or creativity that sometimes (ok, really most of the time) gets tucked away behind the everyday habits of just getting through life and has nowhere to go. i've always had this desire to create beautiful things and i usually funnel that passion through pencils or paintbrushes. even collages. i'm not really that great at it. i couldn't paint a woman standing in on a dock with the wind blowing her skirt around her ankles, even if i wanted to. maybe i haven't explored it enough to feel successful at it, so i tend to steer towards just plain design. i love simplicity and, therefore, usually end up creating a painting that doesn't even fill up the entire canvas, has only 2 major shapes in it, or just is a bunch of colors and lines.
even still, i end up content and feeling somewhat talented. like i have something that makes me, me. like i have a "thing". a talent. something that makes me special and admired. it's almost the way that i try and show who i am or even, who i'd like to be by creating something that shows people something about myself in a way i know they'll never be able to see any other way. i'm not great at it. maybe not even good at it. but i love it.
and i've lost it recently. i haven't picked up a magazine clipping, a charcoal pencil, or bottle of acrylic in so long. i think i'm too busy trying to find something else that could make me unique instead of just doing what i love to do. perhaps i was waiting for that stage in life where i was "settled" and could focus on things like art or hobbies that have nothing to do with the world around me and the life i am so wrapped up in.
well, if that's so, then i may as well never think of myself as an artist.
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. -Emile Zola
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. -Oscar Wilde
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. -Thomas Merton
(I'm making Tim proud with this one)
I saw a Woody Allen movie a couple months ago that was about an artist. He had an apprentice working for him who came to him with a few pieces of her art. She asked him if he thought it was good, He said no, she got upset and said that if it isn't any good than she's going to give it up. To which he replied..."It's art, if you give it up you were never an artist in the first place." Then he went on this long spiel about you don't try to do art it just bleeds from you. But, I thought of that while reading your post.
ReplyDeleteI think you should turn my room into an art studio and bleed away in there.
p.s. I think I would rather have a John Cusak rather than a Jane Austen.