essay - An Artist
Do you know you are an artist? Do you believe it, accept it? Or have you been conditioned to refuse this label, narrowly defining who and how and what makes up someone with this title?
Perhaps you believe an artist is only one of the masterful visual or auditory creators in the realm of painting, drawing, music-making and the like. Maybe you consider a “real” artist an individual who maintains financial stability from selling pieces or prints or, as is more common, perpetually struggles?
What if the term “artist” could stretch, could bend and expand to hold a wider diversity of individuals—as much as the word “human?”
An artist is a communicator, a present and aware chooser of the quality and quantity of one’s (his and her and their) own participation in relationship with energies, or resources. Ok - that was maybe a lot; let’s work backward.
Resources or energies make up the wide spectrum of colors, textures, patterns, sounds, and every element or principle in the practice of art. This extends to invisible, intangible feelings, thoughts, concepts and the like that are likewise translatable. Consider sight as its own language, and taste another - what would the color chartreuse taste like? What color expresses petrichor, that invigorating scent after a summer rain? What sound evokes the thrill of epiphany when an idea reaches a new profound clarity? What does a thought look like?
It depends. And contrast provides context in depicting the relationships that emerge between things. It begins with oneself. Artists are cartographers mapping their inner-child and parent voices, and every other relationship spiraling out from this: the lover, the friend, and the stranger.
An artist is one who accepts authorship and ownership over what they say. And who also embraces change as the only reliable constant.
An artist considers the road ahead, looks at challenges as questions, problems as opportunities, and limitations as guides. One chooses what to say, how to act and respond—not blindly following a generations-old script, but charting new paths—almost always without any guarantee of a positive or comfortable outcome.
Knowing what it means to risk her life, an artist yields her power to every measure of cycling through life to death into rebirth. He steps, stumbles, and skips into an empowered dance with being alive.
An artist faces internal ghosts claiming “fraud!” along with external cries of “impostor!” or “fake!” or even worse, “forgettable.” An artist is daring and bold, often in quiet, subtle, and frequently overlooked ways. Certainly, historically speaking, an artist finds she is readily undervalued. They recognize the limits of their tools, even as they hone techniques in using, and in wielding them.
An artist is monarch and attendant, decreeing and carrying out a vision for their realm, which is their life. He is, she is, they are -- both humble master and glorified servant. Knowing what she’s saying and doing, while at the same time having almost no clue, an artist lives in this land of opposites, sovereign in this land of opportunity.
An artist is also the determining voice, judiciously sifting through data returned or gathered from an experiment, an exploration, an expression. They are simply seeking, seeing, and saying what they saw in what was sought.
An artist is someone who inquires and waits for a reply while continuing to gather input, observe, question and assert a perspective. Cultivating adaptability to change, an artist is often a pioneer in the community. In solitude, an artist remembers that he is never alone, and is constantly at work to integrate the extensive and often chaotic data, the resources of every interaction in his life, whether trivial or pivotal. And furthermore to express, to communicate, what is distilled.
An artist is not the Chosen One, gifted with talent beyond comprehension. An artist is the choosing one.
One, once done, who knows it has only just begun.