Its Only Words...

I'm not an artist. Not in the true sense of the word. Never was, it now seems. After reading up a little on the subject, I've compiled a definition of  art (including within its scope 'Art' and 'The Arts').

Beauty is something that elicits a response of pleasure in someone who perceives it, without arousing desire. Art, then can be broadly and conveniently be defined as something that manifests beauty, in a permanent object or a passing action, through creating or manipulating lines, colors, words, sounds or the body (of the artist or the object) itself, by employing a skill or a craft, with the intent of creation being solely one of expression and not the need to impress or influence. Another interesting and intriguing perspective on art, in terms of recognizing it, is that 'real' art is 'infectious' in the response it generates and it creates within the person who is perceiving it a false sense of ownership (that of creation not possession) and it blurs or erases the boundaries between the consciousness of the artist and the audience.

Now applying and analyzing that rather comprehensive meaning to my life and it's context, I find inconsistencies at several key points.

I started sketching and initially, even painting, from a very young age and was told by the tall people that I was, in fact, an artist. Purely by virtue of my fortunate birth and in no small part, the wicked play and unseemly influence of what I'm assuming is my 'heredity', I soon realized, much to the joy of my emerging narcissism, that I could manipulate, to an extent, sounds and words too. A proud and consequently nurturing and fostering environment helped keep these traits and skills alive and to a point flourishing, in my life and in turn, I developed a keen and admittedly overpowering appreciation for the aesthetics in and the intelligence behind the creations of others as well.

I'm also forced to consider the cultural and social aspects of the unselfish intellectual admiration and at times, selfish, emotional resonance people look for and so find, in their search for personal and collective identities, in recognizing and displaying art and the artist as something to be praised and protected. It has a tendency to paint your unformed image of 'self' with complementary features and add deceptively arbitrary attributes to your otherwise undefined identity in the minds of others.

I have no qualms about admitting that I did consider myself an artist and in spite of rational denial, still do, as it's carved somewhere dark, in to the walls of the twisted and uncertain catacombs of my capriciously but defensively manufactured visage. 

So it falls on my conscious and outwardly visible mind to shape in to communicable thoughts, my epiphany regarding my possible role in the larger scheme of personal and worldly affairs. No, I'm not an artist.

Looking back on the hundreds of pictures my steady hand breathed life in to- on the cheap pages of notebooks in the classroom, designated art books, chart sheets and ambitiously, sometimes on canvases- it becomes clear that my drive to create was not born of a sheer need to express powerful, confusing emotions but more of a product of my overwhelming need to communicate what I observed and saw out there and within me. To be more clear, it was intellect that drove me and not emotion. Communication by definition involves the need to modify that which is being conveyed, to impress and influence the audience, whatever its objective maybe. Art does not.

This is becoming more and more obvious as I browse (by memory.. I never kept them) through the pictures I created. It is and has always been in pursuit of 'realism'. I never felt the need, nor did I have the inclination to venture in to the abstract or the colorfully imaginative. The nature of my work leans toward the descriptive, not expressive.

It is because of this, that I haven't felt the desire to draw in years, instead I switched to language and its manipulation to paint pictures. And it is painting pictures that I do. My narrative and style of articulation relies heavily on descriptive adjectives, long sentence construction and attempted clarity of semantics. The modification of this to appeal to the transcendent aesthetics of skillful wordplay does not interest me. Besides, as far as I'm concerned, to an artist, that should be effortless and instinctual, not resultant of academic yearning.

As I now read the words penned down by my peers, without any intended desire to impress, I'm hit by the subtle and often magnificent articulation of sublime emotions and otherwise incommunicable, elegant imagery.

As admiration turns to introspection, it dawns upon me that this is not what I do, what I can do or what I want to do.

I am a seeker of ideas. Whatever form they take on their course to my cognition or in what shape or through which medium they leave it, doesn't matter to me. And ideas fall within the rigid and fiercely territorial analytic and logical framework of the mind. I simply use the skills handy to convey it.

This makes me a bad student of literature. I'm fundamentally incapable of appreciating the inarticulate joy in eloquent articulation. And as literary analysis deals mainly with the 'whats' and the 'hows', my stubborn obsession with the 'why' can be counterproductive. It dissects the subject matter into pieces and then keeps going deeper and still deeper in to abstractions until I find myself far outside the accepted rules and fluid boundaries of language, stumbling and falling on the profound but intellectually and emotionally unforgiving, practically unanswerable questions of the pointed philosophical kind.

So what am I then? Carefully resisting the urge to go off on a tangential journey in to 'I', let me just say that I believe I am a craftsman and a thinker. Nothing more, nothing less.