Dear bloggers,

This is just a quick post, but I wanted to highlight a line from one of Matt’s posts last week, when he was discoursing on what it is to be an artist.

One line in his post struck me especially keenly:

“What we are doing as artists is taking our limited abilities, stretching them as far as we possibly can within a geographic area we call our body—and an unlimited area we call our spirit, mind, and soul—mixing it with some sort of substance, and presenting it to ourselves to make some sense of what the universe is about.”

To my mind, that sentence is as good a distillation of what the artist is and does, as any I’ve ever read or heard.

I especially like the terminology Matt uses when he defines the artist’s physical capacities as delimited by “a geographic area we call our body,” but their mental and spiritual capacities as “an unlimited area.”

His verb, “stretching,” is also right on-point...  The artist doesn’t just utilize his or her abilities, they stretch them.

And of course, making sense of the universe and our place within it, is what any creative person aspires to do, fundamentally.

I just thought it was an elegant way to express such a complex undertaking.  Matt really nailed it in just 60 words, very poetically expressed.

If any of you who read this are artists and have alternate definitions of the artist’s purpose—either that you yourself have thought up or that you’ve read or heard—we’d love to hear them.

Warm wishes,
Richard
Blog editor