Art can be a wonderful tool for highlighting your individuality, helping you connect with others, heal & grow as a person. Yawn! Okay, let me put it this way. If you can’t afford the Armani ties or the Gucci belt that would really show people your worth & who you really are, you need art. If you can’t find someone to not only hear but listen and understand the brilliance you feel is trapped, uselessly inside your brain because no one has the attention span for the volumes of knowledge you contain, you need art. It is a tool that can connect like minded individuals on a deeper level than normally surfaces with the acquaintances we usually encounter in real life. The best part is it does it in a split second.& it does it for free. You don’t have to buy the piece, you just have to look at it long enough to allow yourself to feel something. And that is just you as the viewer. If you have the privlege of being the artist it takes it to a whole new level of expression & connection. I recently saw a brilliant interview of Brene Brown where she explained this perfectly. She states how “creatives have the incredible ability, when they find the confidence, to be able to find beauty and value in being part of a creative community but also the courage to stand alone.” The epiphany of this concept is that an artist is socially no different than the rest of us in their every day lives and yet, unlike us, they take their experiences to their solitude because they aren't afraid of it and use their emotions to their advantage. Artists understand that, as Brene further explains,
“Art has the power to render sorrow beautiful & make loneliness a shared experience & transform despair into hope. Music like all art gives pain and our most wrenching emotions voice, language and form so it can be recognized and shared. The magic of all art is the ability to both capture our pain and deliver us from it at the same time.” An artist that has captured their own emotions in a song or painting has taken a thing someone else cant experience with their five sense and made it tangible! I find that the most brilliant thing for the same reason we all have said, “A picture is worth a thousand words” or “you see what i mean?”. We all know how hard it is to explain what we are feeling to someone else not going through the same thing and how badly we need someone else to understand. But seeing a picture or hearing a melody about the experience adds levels to understanding it that will never be able to be put into words. Art is the best opportunity we have to allow someone else to experience the feeling of our emotion. And if that doesn't make you feel less alone i don't know what will.
Lets use this painting of mine as an example. It’s called April Showers. I’ll just start with my interpretation of this since you have probably already decided how you feel about it. This is one of my favorite paintings i’ve done. What I see when I look at it is first of all a little girl. She is cold, wet, physically vulnerable, lost in her thoughts & trying to make sense of her emotions about her current state in life. After all, no matter how old we are, we all feel like lost little children when we are in this kind of state of mind, don't we? She’s has stopped on her way into work or school, standing in her muddy boots, that were probably cute when they were clean and new. You know that rainy day feeling where you really don't want to go into your ‘less than glamorous’ blue collar job because on your way you imagine all the beautiful socialites and heiress’ that never have to go out and get their hair wet and their boots muddy. She notices all those people that don't have to ‘work for it’. But she also notices a freshly bloomed red tulip wilting under the heaviness of the rain shower. She thinks to herself, “but what’s more beautiful & perfect than a flower? That flower looks sad now but when the sun comes out and the raindrops shake off, she’ll perk up just like new again. I’m like that too i guess. I clean up pretty good when i’m not soaked and muddy.” But then she also thinks, “maybe the bad weather makes this little flower stronger than others that never had to endure it.. and being strong is beautiful too. Maybe beauty doesn't only come when the conditions are perfect and sunny. Maybe there is more beauty in the ability to shake the rain off your petals, strut your muddy boots into work and get shit done.” Thats what this painting is to me. Beauty on the outside and the inside. One‘s ability to have confidence in their physical beauty, even when it’s not perfect, because they know their inner beauty shows through when it counts. That ability to keep showing up & taking care of business when life gets a little uncomfortable. The strength. The heiress’ will never be able to buy that. It’s earned. The idea is the same with the actual painting itself. Physically the painting is beautiful on the outside, but also has a deeper meaning when you look beneath the surface that makes it more valuable that it would be if it were ‘just a pretty face’.
So you see how this painting shows you a clearer picture of who I am on a much deeper level than any Gucci belt could ever hope to. But that’s just my ‘artist’s interpretation’. You don't have to paint the canvas to have an outlook on it. You can look at any other painting by another artist and have and equally in depth connection to it. Think about that for a moment. The idea that you can look at a painting that you have never seen before and given enough time and thought, form such a poignant & personal attachment to the representation of a complete strangers personal experience and emotions. Even if your interpretation of the painting is different than the artists, your still connected to that person in a more personal way than is normal given two strangers passing on the street. You are both mentally and emotionally connected to one painting and no matter what you look like or where you are from, that means not only are you not alone in the world, but your also not alone in what shakes your soul to life. That my friend is truly special connection indeed.
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