Issue 04: I Hate Thinking About Art: Life Through The Eyes Of A Writer
I hate thinking about art. I hate thinking about art within the confines of poetry on coffee stained book pages or globs of acrylic paint clinging to canvas. I hate thinking about art as a talent. I hate thinking about art as something that just a lucky few have the approved knack for. I hate thinking about art as a job. I hate thinking about art as only something you see, something that remains external from you. I hate thinking about art as a hat I get to put on, show off, and go to sleep without.
In the first grade, I had an art docent stroll into my class for our one-every-few-months charity case of an art program. I’m pretty sure we painted our sticky 7 year old hands and slapped them on pieces of construction paper to make Thanksgiving turkeys, only to be teased if ours was messy or misshapen. I think often about the ways in which we were taught to view art when we were children. It is confined to the linearity of lead lines and museums displays (and that is simply.. all it was). The way I learned about art taught me that there were limits to it. Some people are born for it, and some are not. It was a hobby, it was a dream job only for those unrealistic enough to wish it, and it was an elective we got to partake in every once in a blue moon.
I think that most people do not grow out of this way of thinking. We are molded to view art in a very specific way. As most of us grow into adulthood with this perspective, and pursue jobs in STEM fields, in business, in law, we allow the distance between ourselves and art to grow, and to deepen. Maybe it is pretentious to think in this way, but the perpetration of a grey, suburban, capitalistic aesthetic of a life is enabled by the lack of importance or influence we award to the potential we each have to look at the world the way an artist does.
I loved to write when I was little. I filled notebook upon notebook with stories, and there are dozens of half-finished novels squeezed into the empty slots of my bookshelf. When we are young, and our imaginations haven’t been crippled by the boot of reality, we look at everything differently. Before our creativity is stifled, before we are told what is possible and what is not, and before we first hear the phrase “the real world is not all sunshine and roses”, we are pure. This kind of cognitive purity, and way of thinking, is what makes so many people nostalgic for their childhoods. When the world seemed overly saturated, and you were certain fairies lived in the woods behind your house, and every kissing couple on the street was no less than a prince and princess.
It is this kind of perception, and the ability to hold onto it, or rediscover it, that makes an artist. It is not the ability to paint. It is not the ability to point your toes perfectly in every turn of a ballet recital. It is not the ability to insert the perfect adjective in the right place in a sentence. Art cannot be put into a box. Artists are not just individuals with talent, they are individuals who are willing to look beyond their grey-tinted frames and realize that life is art already. As cliche as it seems, art really is in every single place you look. You yourself, are art.
This realization, this shift, is what launched me back into a rediscovering of the child-like artist that had been buried by years of trying to force myself into thinking it was all a pipe dream. You can build layers on top of this kind of thinking. You can lock it up in the deepest parts of you, and throw the key away, but as a human, the dissatisfaction with dullness can’t ever truly be pushed completely out of sight. There is an innate desire in all of us, a sense of hope, that the world is still as beautiful as we believed it to be.
As I’ve spent more time fine-tuning the writer in me over the past few years, I have begun to see the world differently. An artist, I have learned, is nothing more than someone who pays attention to the world. Writing, for me, has been the most essential tool in unlocking a more abstractly observant state of mind. Art is simply translating human experience into another medium. When I look at the world now, I see art in everything. Strangers, old buildings, two hands holding onto each other on the train, the sky (at any time of day), his laugh, her perfect notes in history class.
Viewing this life in this way allows me to be more grateful. Writing, and connecting with my inner artist again, gives me hope. It gave me the opportunity to see the emotion that is injected into every conversation I have. It lets me be more patient in listening. It prompts me to look at the parts of my life, and lives of others, that are hurting, and ask what I can make of it?
Art is the reason I believe most of us are still here. Our favorite movies and music and colors and that peachy orange sunset we will remember until we watch our last. Art is lying underneath it all, begging for us to recognize our own potential, and harness our ability to connect with being on that deeper level. I hate thinking about art in a way that diminishes what it really is. I hate thinking about art as anything less than a human experience, a way of life, and a lense that anyone has the potential to peak through.
