Art is Life

The secret to creating real art is not giving a damn about what anyone else thinks.  Easier said than done of course, but that ability is a gift that is freeing.  Because art is art, and it doesn’t have to be “good.”  Because what is good, anyway?  “Good” is wholly subjective to the speaker of the word.  There is no “good,” in art, there is only expression.  And if it is your expression, it’s yours to express, there is no wrong answer.  And once you get that, you understand those pieces you’ve seen in a museum and thought, “Well, that’s not great, I could do that.”  Maybe you could, but you didn’t.  And that artist had something to say, and they said it with paint, or lead, or sculpted iron.  Does it have to be pretty?  No.  Does it have to be lifelike?  No.  It just has to be.  That is art.

If there is expression, then there is art. 

When I started my private tour through hell, otherwise known as coming down with a seemingly unknowable ailment, I started to paint - and paint big.  When Mom first got sick six years before, I baked cakes like a crazy person - an outlet for stress.  That was the beginning of my habit of taking up a new hobby when under stress.  This time, it was painting.  I’d never done any painting before, but I went down to the art store, and with Ricky’s help procured a stack of small practice boards and a few giant canvases, about 4 feet tall and 5 feet wide.  Why so huge?  I just felt like I had something to say, and it felt big.  I bought brushes of all sizes and acrylic paint in many colors.  I began with the practice boards, trying my hand at painting cherry blossoms on branches, and a silhouette of a human figure in front of a sunset.  They were what I’d call “restrained”.  And then Ricky gave me a fantastic tip.

“Put in some headphones, play some good music, and then just paint, see what happens.”

That’s when the big canvases came out, and the big tubes of paint.  I placed old sheets on the floor as drop cloths. I used an old plastic container as a pallet.  And I just let it happen.  I had a vague idea of images I wanted to paint, but I didn’t work from life or from photos.  I knew I wanted to paint cherry blossoms, bamboo, rain, and the sea.  The first was an abstract that could be best described as a black and white bamboo forest in the rain.  I carefully worked on the bamboo stalks, one at a time.  I tried to make them as recognizable as possible, which wasn’t too hard, but some of them looked weird, and I was unhappy with the result.  I dunked my brush in water, and started swiping at the stalks I didn’t like.  They started to blend - the different tones of paint mixing together, and creating this rainy washed out look.  I kept going, swiping and blending, adding more paint, swiping some more, up and down.  Next to the few stalks I left, I had what I wanted, and it looked like I felt.  A few perfect stalks, surrounded by sad and angry brushstrokes in tones of gray, black, and white.  It felt like I’d let something out of myself.

 Next, the moon over the ocean at night, its reflection sparkling on the water and stars in the sky.  This time I worked from a photo, but the sea looked more rough than in the image that inspired the painting.  The moon was bigger, the sky darker.  It looked like I felt: haunted, reflective,  but the image was strangely calming.  I put a star in the sky for every year Ricky and I had been together - eight, at that time.   

Then, the ocean.  Just water and sky, this time.  I blended greens and blues to get water that looked like the unique colors down in the Keys.  Almost white in places, and deeply indigo in others - it looked like the night sea blending into the day.   This one was more serene, and it made me feel so.  More canvases, and more ocean.  I painted like I felt - urgent, without control, full.  And I painted what I longed for: peace. 

Would anyone think they were ‘good’?  I don’t care, it doesn’t matter.  It was therapeutic as hell.

I still paint from time to time, but the giant canvases are gone.  I work small, painting beautiful scenes in nature - places I want to go.  My work is more controlled, I work from photos.  I’m patient, taking weeks to complete a work, when those huge canvases were completed in an afternoon.  

We judge our lives, as we judge art, as “good” or not.  But, the truth is that there is only expression.  There is only living a life.  Does it have to be pretty?  No.  Do we?  No.  Does it have to be like everyone else’s?  No. Does it have to be a straight path?  No.   Isn’t it better when it’s none of those things? It just has to be, and that is good enough.  We have something to say, and we say it through our decisions, our love, our contributions, our art, our generosity, and our actions.  We feel what we feel, we are who we are, we bloom how we bloom and we will become who we will become.  

There is only one right way to do that, and it is ours alone.  Pop in a playlist, and see what happens.