Amanda M Priebe yes, that is how I feel. Practicing art is like practicing medicine or practicing farming or anything else where one is totally committed, and so much so that doing it very well has consequences for the person doing it and the community they serve.
To identify with stupid mere superficial terms of verbal language like the term “creatives”is a way to let go of the more honourable and long standing word Artist. Paradoxically it isn’t the honour of the word “artist” that I seek exactly, it is the truth that in any given day a soul might find all forces in their lives might come together and for a blessed moment or day of being, they might make something that inspires others to feel their liberty and feel inspired to do something with as much excellence as anyone has ever done it. And in being so dedicated to giving to their cause they leave a trace of themselves that could inspire somebody else in a useful way!!
When ever a human does that, it is not merely making decorations nor merely making pretty things, it is not merely being creative; it is striking a chord of resonant truth!
I walked beside a then 93 year old master farmer named Rollie Hennig on his farm in Stony Plain for a few hours one day. When he talked he breathed and the words seemed almost a song, as if his being and the wind were one thing. Humility is too shallow of a word but there was nothing about aspiring nor “getting ‘er done” nor “trying” to do things. He was doing things at all moments of our walk. He walked and talked easily in step with the changing light; and the wind seemed to be registering on his cheek an ever important indicator of what to be doing next.
Willpower seemed less a part of it because it seemed more like a collaboration with what the elements of life in that moment would offer him the chance to do. He was revealed to me that day as a master artist.
It was me who was humbled. I met a living master! I think I know a couple of living masters of the practice of visual art. None are any more artists than Rollie and Beatrice Hennig. The two and their son Perry worked that day as a team with ease and rhythms that looked as practiced and effortless as a bird flying across the farm yard . Nature had taught them not to fight nor fear but to listen and adapt and to be at it all day, and not to be “done”, but to be “doing “ what nature asked of them. Sure it was long days, sure things broke down, and sure they face the pains of life but the need of the farm and the need of the art they practiced was the only important issue they seemed to serve, and they were in complete harmony with that.
This was many years ago now so I fear they may not be with us any more but on that day I took away a farm family lesson about art that changed my life and changed my way of making art and making my way in life. We all mingle with the breeze and it is a lovely lively dance. We need focus and an eye on what is called for. It’s an art....not a decoration.
Interesting how words beget words isn’t it Kerri ? I came to a point where I began to wonder if verbal language and visual language and auditory language and the language of taste all just need a break from each other...? Music about Architecture is about as useful and interesting as architecture about sculpture. Or dance about painting...it is!!! It is interesting, but words are the sibling of the modes of communication that seem to be the favoured child, and that is fine and even possibly understandable since we have come to build our whole world around words but what if...? What if we hadn’t thought to make any mode primary or first? What, if any of the other modes of communication had become more primary? It’s just a fun thing to ponder , no? Ideas and structures within eras become words and these words block us from seeing things outside of the realm of our constructed structures. Deconstructavists have written at very long length about this fact for example....
...but it is worth a playful thought to consider how orthodoxy is constructed and how polarities bind us? Until only recently gender was only one of two things, politics in the USA is still one of two things...thankfully the arts are many of many things and defining those many things comes with exactly as you say...many words and some become exclusive or elitist. Elitism isn’t even wrong in some ways? Perhaps? Olympic sports? Or Math and science and maybe usefulness could be measured?
But is it lovely and true that the single art work or the single word or single sentence...original and true may never gain its author a friendly smile or a meal of worthy warmth, even if the world finally sees a beautiful idea from it? or is it enough even that one other single equally lost soul recognizes a kindred spirit in the utterance, painting or sound?
I feel good comes to us daily from all over....being alive is a painful, messy, horrifying but also stunning , miraculously unpredictable challenge of incomprehensible miracles.
Some art reveals to some and others to others and talking is one way of sharing how we feel...but let us remain always vigilant that we try to see others?...other arts in between? People trying in between? Maybe beyond the consensus there lays an opportunity to enjoy potential that none have yet seen? Let’s hope, for the sake of our world that this always is taught in school and that so is humility is a virtue? I feel about as vulnerable and uncertain as ever but I engage with life and with others not to win or to be best...rather to openly ask is there is better? What ever we love about our community or love about our Province, our street, or Country...should we not openly discuss the least aggressive way to enjoy the nature of what only it has to offer?
Too much will power, to many developments and wilderness is lost for ever? If it is the will of many then it comes to be but...in that invention from many sometimes a lost point of view held the key to sustaining exactly what everyone was overlooking and maybe that single soul just didn’t bother to make their argument grander and more forcefully nor even in the write art form (write intended).