Hello, bloggers.
Recently someone asked me if I think artists are born or made.
I believe all people are born artists, but in our upbringing, our heritage, our religious beliefs, our baggage that we carry with us, the philosophy of art gets lost, drummed out of us, and relegated to an unimportant position.
“What do you mean you’re painting?” people say. “You should be creating some new innovation on the Internet!”
Art is the window into the soul. If you’re an artist, you have to confront yourself, which is a very scary and uncomfortable place to be—to truly look at yourself as you are, shedding all the bullshit we surround ourselves with, the “Me me me,” the “Ah, look at me, the great and mighty Oz! The big man in the fancy suit!”
In many cases people are ignoring the artistic side of themselves, which is somewhat lyrical and opens you up to all kinds of criticism and wondering, “Will people like it or not?”
It’s taking a big risk to be an artist, to show yourself to yourself and then to the world, where many people won’t understand it, some people will pretend to understand it, and maybe a handful actually will understand it—which is a real achievement since in most cases you yourself don’t understand what the hell you’re doing.
To me, art is the self-examination and the archaeological dig into the hidden parts of ourselves.
Art should be a discovery for other people, not so much as a psychoanalysis of who we are, but of who they are. If one person looks at your art and sees a fight and another person sees intercourse, maybe they have their minds in different places.
To me, art is a snapshot of where each of us as individuals is in our pilgrimage of this existence. That’s why, in most cases, I don’t name my paintings. I have other people name them when they buy them. They don’t mean the same thing that they did when I made them. The paintings didn’t change, but I changed. I think it’s presumptuous for me to dictate what they’re supposed to be.
In the last paragraph of Alexander Borovsky’s essay in the book about my show at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, he writes that he believes I have bred in myself as an artist the qualities that make up life: the drama, the color, the illness, the everyday routine, and so on.
The last sentence says: “Such is the autobiography of the self-made man that bred the artist in himself.”
So maybe we reestablish the artist that was drummed out of us as we went from childhood to adulthood. Maybe we resurrect it. Maybe we never lost it to begin with. Whatever the case, it’s something we cannot take for granted.
If we take enough time, risks, and introspection, we can all be artists, musicians, singers, dancers, and so on. How do we get there? The best advice is: Stop talking, start doing.
Matt