Success = Following your heart
Failure = not following it
Heart = Love
Love
A four letter word
❤️
most of us will spend a great portion of our lives trying to:
figure out
experience
save
hold on to
chase
feel
or better yet
just to define what love is
The definitions I found online categorize love into three parts:
1) a strong or constant affection for a person
2) sexual or romantic desire
3)A person you love in a romantic way
Great definitions but underwhelming
How do these three definitions explain the myriad of feelings that I have felt towards activities, objects, and people that I love?
A simple word meant to encompass a greater spectrum of emotions and actions.
Perhaps an analogy might get across what it is I’m trying to say:
A young child waits for the school bus every morning
This school bus picks up all of the kids in the neighbourhood at a central spot
let’s say the park.
Every morning this child walks to the prearranged location and meets up with the 6 other kids to catch the bus to school. As the days go by the child begins to become friends with another child and one day the two of them are waiting in the rain and some of the others start splashing in puddles. The first child starts to head over and splash as well, but stops noticing that their new friend isn’t following.
The new friend doesn’t have rain boots so splashing in the puddles would mean wet feet all day.
the child loves their new friend
And doesn’t want to be exclusive
What would you do in this situation?
If a person you love was feeling excluded?
perhaps you might:
grab a pair of old boots
sit under the tree together and wait for the bus
Maybe take turns with the boots you do have
go barefoot with each other to the puddle
There are quite a few ways that the child could act that would be aligned with their feelings of affection and love.
In this scenario let’s say that
The child, realizing their friend doesn’t have the same opportunity for puddle jumping, takes off the rain boots and encourages the new friend to do the same with their shoes. Both barefoot they run and jump into the nearest puddle laughing and cheering until the bus pulls up. They both use the drive to school to dry their feet. Stepping off the bus they have big smiles and dry shoes, ready for a big day.
The child’s
Art
is taking off the shoes
the painting
is the two children jumping in the puddle together.
Art: a way of solving a problem that is skillful and individual to the artist
What if you wished to express love and affection on a canvas with paint?
The ups and downs you would experience getting to the final painting would be a lot different than mine.
Which makes sense in that our art is different.
We are Different
How we get to the final painting would be different
as would the paintings
The art world, critics, peers, social media, telling you what you should or shouldn’t paint, or what makes good or bad art would be like having a parent telling the child not to take off the boots, or a Good Samaritan giving a pair of boots to the child before the first drop ever fell
So how is this an analogy for art?
Well in painting we are always making decisions
Some decisions all make
to drink if we are thirsty
eat if we are hungry
it is in the specificity of these decisions that our individual voice in art is found
(choosing what to eat or drink)
In the analogy I’m sure you could think of different ways to show affection to some one you love who wished to puddle jump with you
Art is not stagnant or something that can be held down and quantified
There are an infinite number of ways to express
describing an action as if it were an object
“What a wonderful piece of art“
a painting, sculpture, film, or birthday cake
The art is the action it took to get to the finished product
The destination is the painting and the journey that the painter took to get there is the art
here is the tricky part
How much of the journey must the viewer know in order to understand the product of the Artist?
If I judge the efficacy of a painting
verses
If I judge the Art that got me there
How might these two judgements change the feelings of validity in my artistic pursuit?
Do I try to quantify success and failure in my paintings as a way to move forward?
or
Do I immerse myself in the process without concern for the final product
The answer that has helped me the most follows:
the quantifiable world is an anchor made out of styrofoam on the ocean of the abstract infinite
Good LUck
🤞