His Art
It had been two weeks, and he still had not found his art. Maybe he is too left brain to create art. He had tried writing two different short stories. One story he had been thinking about for months, but it just didn’t pan out. Reading what he had written, it sounded silly. And he realized he was trying to write about feelings he had not experienced himself. Better to write what you know, wasn’t that the mantra for the writer. This was depressing, and it made him very despondent. What if he has no art to find, what if it's just not in him. Does everyone have the ability to create something artistic? Maybe he was too much of a programmer to function as an artist. Maybe the traits that made him a good programmer, organized, logical, detailed, worked against him in the pursuit of art. Could it be that years and years of thinking like a developer had trained his brain in such a way that art was now out of reach? Does art require the ability to lie? Is fiction lying? The characters are not real. The events they go through are concocted in the writers head. He abhorred lying. It displays human weakness and selfishness and distrust.
The thing he could not understand was the desire not just to write, but to write fiction. He didn’t read a lot of fiction, “reality is much more interesting than fiction” he told his children. But he reasoned that fiction was art. Writing a book about history is not art per se, but research and displaying of facts. What was this compulsion? Where did it come from? It was an itch that could not be scratched. It was maddening. He could somewhat understand why he could not write. He could deal with the rationalization, but he could not understand the desire. What made him want to create art? Then he picked up Henry Miller, one of his favorite authors, and read from the book Tropic of Capricorn, “From the beginning it was never anything but pure chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills.” That was pure magic to him, to convey that much in one sentence was so beautiful and powerful. That was art. That was why.
The thing he could not understand was the desire not just to write, but to write fiction. He didn’t read a lot of fiction, “reality is much more interesting than fiction” he told his children. But he reasoned that fiction was art. Writing a book about history is not art per se, but research and displaying of facts. What was this compulsion? Where did it come from? It was an itch that could not be scratched. It was maddening. He could somewhat understand why he could not write. He could deal with the rationalization, but he could not understand the desire. What made him want to create art? Then he picked up Henry Miller, one of his favorite authors, and read from the book Tropic of Capricorn, “From the beginning it was never anything but pure chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills.” That was pure magic to him, to convey that much in one sentence was so beautiful and powerful. That was art. That was why.
posted by Unknown at
1:29 PM
3 Comments:
I think "finding your why" is the most important part of art.
The art we make contains all the reasons, and emotions, we carry for making that art.
Essientially, what we produce is simply a vessel for what we had inside.
In that case I am doomed.
I think you have to be passionate about your art. Because you love it so much you want to try and try again until the art becomes true to you. It is through this repeated process of trial and error that you become an artist that's up to your own standards.
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