Art

Art in some form or another has existed as long as man. It is a part of our daily lives and is present in cultures across the world. Most people have an appreciation for art. They enjoy observing it or creating it, they may even support it financially or by volunteering.

Merriam Webster describes art as ‘something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings’. But I can’t share this opinion, I don’t consider it to be full. From my perspective, art is something created with imagination and skill meant to arouse an emotional response with its audience.

For many, art is meant to instill a myriad of emotions in the beholder, such as beauty, awe, surprise, sadness, anger, and even disgust. Some artworks generate feelings rather quickly, while others depend on elaborate thought and knowledge. Actually, our response to art always depends on what we know—which includes factual knowledge about the world, cultural knowledge, knowledge gained from personal experiences, and even knowledge about the art process itself.

 

In our pragmatic culture we usually see art as optional. We drill this into kids from an early age. We tell them to be practical and belittle their dreams because we can’t imagine how they’ll make any money pursuing them.

But the truth is, art is indispensable. Art gives us meaning. There are things that cannot be understood with pure reason—like love and beauty, to name two. Art helps us understand our world. It is vital because it concerns our perception, and how we perceive the world affects everything we do and say. From that point of view art is a way of seeing and being. It concerns not only our senses but our conception of reality all together.

Art has the power to point us to the divine, to the ultimate Artist. It doesn’t answer all the questions, but it can shine a light on questions we didn’t even know we had.

It is a reminder that there are things that exist in the universe beyond staying in one place and engaging in some dull, repetitive, futile task every day, dressing and behaving according to codes, and pretending that it isn't awful.

 

Art is the fingerprint of our existence in the world that has its impact on things we transform to the use of our imagination. It is always the case that there are some aspiration, some insight, something that happens in the transformation of the every day through an artistic impulse that is entirely human and therefore subjective,  something that goes beyond the thoughtless, it goes beyond something quite important in an entirely different way.

The cool thing is that creativity works like a muscle; the more we use it, the stronger it gets.

 

Art is to provide tools to learn and discover the resources we each have within us already, and to show a way to express ourselves which is not just clever, shocking, or masterful technique, but expression that actually touches the heart and radiates something positive to the world.

Each person can walk away with a completely different message or emotion. But good art should in some way engage with its audience. Marcel Duchamp once said, “Art can be bad, good, indifferent but whatever adjective is used we must call it art and bad art is still art in the same way as the bad emotion is still an emotion.” Everyone who creates with imagination, skill creates art. J.D. Salinger said, “An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s”.

This comes from my belief that there is nothing intrinsic about art. We cannot do a chemical analysis to determine if something is art or not. Instead, I feel like calling something “art” is really just a subjective way of indicating value—which could be aesthetic, cultural, monetary, and so on.

Maybe we feel a longing to express ourselves but often we are stopped by fear and embarrassment, or we feel that we do not have the time or the skills to proceed. Perhaps, when we want to create, our mind just becomes a blank.

Nevertheless, there is a drive within all of us to create and express ourselves through art. Observe any child with box full of crayons and a piece of paper and you will see it. I believe that drive comes from a need to achieve a balance within ourselves.

All of us are a little unbalanced in some way. We are too intellectual, too emotional, too masculine or feminine, too calm or excitable. The art we love is frequently something we’re drawn to because it compensates us for what we lack: it counterbalances us. When we’re moved by a work of art it may be because it contains concentrated doses of the qualities we need more of often in our lives. Perhaps it’s full of the serenity we admire, but that don’t have enough of. Perhaps it’s got the tenderness we long for, but that our jobs and relationships are currently lacking. Or perhaps it’s suffused with a pain and drama we’ve had to stifle, but want to get in touch with.

The art a country or a person calls beautiful gives you vital clues as to what is missing in them. It’s in the power of art to help people to be more rounded, more balanced and more sane.

That balance is felt when you are creating something exactly as you wish it to be. Sometimes other forms of communication may fail to allow us to express ourselves completely, and this is when we turn to art.

It is important that we know our history. We learn the dates, people and places of important events, and we even learn why and how they occurred. Art gives us a different insight into our history. It shows us how those events impacted the people living them. Through art we learn the joy felt during times of happiness and we see the pain and despair during times of suffering. We see the hopes and the dreams, or the fears and regrets of the past. Through art we gain a better understanding of how the events throughout history have shaped us into what we are today.

We live in a fast-paced world of quick decisions and fragmented thoughts. Creating art allows us to slow down and experience the full range of our emotions. Viewing the art of others can give rise to emotions within us and help us explore and interpret what we are feeling. Understanding our emotions can help us heal, grow and improve ourselves. Increasing our self-awareness through art can lead to more success both personally and professionally.

When we create art we make decisions throughout the entire process. When we view art we make decisions on how to interpret what we are seeing. We use logic and reason to attribute meaning to what we see or what we create. Because art has such an emotional connection to us, these choices are passionate to us. We learn to defend them and explain them to others. Art not only helps strengthen our critical thinking skills, but improves the way we communicate our thoughts and emotions to others.

Through art we gain a better understanding of cultures in the past, but it also gives us insight into various cultures of present day. There are no distance or language barriers in art, it is universal. By observing the creations of people from other cultures we can gain a better understanding of their lives. Through art we are able to get a glimpse of another person’s existence through their eyes. It is a powerful tool that can improve communication and relationships between cultures.

The world often requires us to put on a cheerful façade, but beneath the surface there’s a lot of sadness and regret that we can’t express from fear of seeming weird or a loser. One thing art can do is to reassure us of the normality of pain. It can be sad with us and for us. Some of the world’ s greatest works of art had the capacity to make the pain that’s inside all of us more publically visible and available, like putting on a sad piece of music, somber works of art don’t have to depress us. Rather they can give us the welcome feeling pain is part of the human condition. Art fights the false optimism of commercial society. It reminds us with dignity every good life has extraordinary amounts of confusion, suffering, loneliness and distress within it and therefore we should never aggravate that sadness by feeling we must be freakish, simply experiencing quite a lot.

On the other hand, most popular works of art in the world show pretty things: happy people, flowers in spring, blue skies. This is the top selling postcards in the world from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This enthusiasm for prettiness worries serious types a lot. They wonder: have people forgotten that life is really like? But that seems a misplaced worry. We need pretty things close to us not because we are in danger of forgetting the bad stuff, but because terrible problems weigh so heavily on us, that we are in danger of slipping into despair and depression. That’s why prettiness matter. It’s an emblem of hope, which is an achievement. Prettiness, these flowers and blue skies and kids in meadows is hope bottled and preserved, waiting for us when we need it.

But art doesn’t necessarily mean to be a thing of beauty alone. It might be quite disturbing. Joyce Carol Oats said, “I believe that art should not be comforting. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies and directions we may not anticipate and make our own. ”

Art is a sort of propaganda in the sense of the tool that motivates and energizes you for a cause. It is propaganda on behalf of the nicest and most important emptions and attitudes in the world – which uses its skills to make newly appealing and accessible. It might me propaganda about simple life or about the need to broaden one’s horizons, or about more playful, tender approach to life. It’s a force that stands up for the best sides of human nature and gives them a platform and authority in a noisy, distracted world. For too long, art has attracted a little too much reverence and mystique for its own good. In its presence we’re like someone meeting a very famous person. We get stiff and lose our spontaneity. We should relax around it, as we already do with music and learn to use it for what it’s really meant for: as a constant source of support and encouragement for our better selves.

Art can make a community more beautiful. It makes the spaces we work in more interesting. Our homes reflect our personalities through the art we choose to display. It can inspire us, make us happy, or even motivate us. Living in a purely functional world would lack meaning for us as human beings. We need to express ourselves through art and we need to surround ourselves with the expressions of others. We always have, and we always will.

Contemporary art encompasses many different art forms, from traditional media such as paintings and drawings to more recently developed approaches that use digital and time-based media to create works that incorporate both sound and image.

Technically, a painting is a two-dimensional art form which is made up of layers of pigments applied onto a surface. The surface on which the pigment is applied varies from stone (used in the Paleolithic Age) to paper, wood, cloth and canvas.

A drawing is defined as a two-dimensional medium where an image is depicted on a flat surface by making lines and areas of tone through shading. Line and shading are created most commonly by using ink, pencil, crayon, pastels, charcoal and chalk.  Watercolour pencils can also be used to create a more painterly effect in a drawing.

Metalpoint drawing is a more unusual method which involves a stylus with a point made of gold, silver, cooper or lead pressed on a paper/parchment surface, which has been coated with a paste of crushed eggshell or bone.

The term installation was coined in the 1970s to describe artwork that of any form or size that inhibits a space inside or outside a gallery, which is often site-specific. 

New Media work is often created by using digital and electronic technologies to make sound pieces, to capture moving images (e.g. animation/film) and to create interactive work and computer-based art. Traditional art practices such as print-making can also integrate digital technologies. For example, an image can be manipulated in Photoshop before going to print through a press.

Mixed-media tends to refer to artworks that use a combination of materials in their construction. For example, a work on canvas that combines paint and ink as well as collage.

The use of mixed media can be seen to be rooted in the Cubist Collages and constructions of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. 

To make people free is the aim of art, therefore art for me is the science of freedom. (Joseph Beuys)

I implicitly subscribe to this quotation. I find my freedom in writing. It is probably a vain effort to somehow control the world in which I live, recreating it in a manner that satisfies my sense of what the world should look like and be like.

I’m trying to capture in language the things that I see and feel, as a way of recording their beauty and power and terror, so that I can return to those things and relive them. In that way, I try to have some sense of control in a chaotic world.

I want to somehow communicate my sense of the world—that way of understanding, engaging, experiencing the world—to somebody else. I want them to be transported into the world that I have created with language.

And so the ultimate aim of my writing is to create an environment of empathy, something that would allow the miracle of empathy to take place, where human beings can seem to rise out of themselves and extend themselves into others and live within others. That has a tremendous power for the human being. And I know this, because that is what other people’s writing does to me when I read it.

In fact, the essence of art is to express our personal genuineness without imitating others. It is incredibly intimate. As is said, « to find your own voice », not just in painting and conventional ideas about art, but in everything we do so that our whole life feels healthy and complete.