Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Life Is Art

LIFE IS ART     

Somewhere, back there, I once heard that how we live our lives is our greatest expression of art.  That has stuck with me.  I was a college art student raw, green, naive, passion filled to take it all on, all of life.  This sounded like wise advice about living well. 

  I am surprised every time someone not working in “the arts” responds to the fact that I am an artist with almost a reverence of attitude.  A peek at the reality behind the curtain would startle them.  Their verbal exchange many times refers to “how lucky I am to be an artist”.   With this I can’t argue because I am lucky to be positioned in life to have physical outlet that allows me to express my response through creation…appropriately a self determined process of selection.  I choose the medium and I choose how adept I become using it and I choose to present that combination to an audience, viewers.  This is starting to sound like “control issues”.  Control, well, we all know that’s bogus. 

Of course, I don’t have an internal dialogue something like this:  “Hey Ann, things are really sucky, but you are lucky...just go take it out on some clay.  Get yourself down there in the studio and work this out.  Get to work. Crack the whip.  This will fix everything.”

Being that straight forward would be discounting the challenge.  We can’t have that!  Ease of life, hummm, not if all life is a challenge.  Perhaps those thinking me to be especially lucky are only expressing their own internal desire to have some modality of external expression for internal challenge.  Emotions could take on a manifestation of their own, something that helps process one’s own process of life; the mystique of the spirit, the weighty ephemeral stuff, felt not seen.
                                                                                                                                                                                          

Whacking around some clay is certainly a lot more socially acceptable than dishing out justice
to whosoever might deserve it. ( You know who you are.)  

                                                                                                                                                         


There’s joyful expression, too, non-political and aesthetically uplifting.  Those expressions can show our kinder gentler selves; the ones that don’t upset the audience and uplift our spirits.
       
Thank Heaven its only clay! 



Soft malleable, sensual, wet, receptive, impressionable, chameleon stuff 
that can be turned as permanent as anything can be.  
Sounds like control issues again.  So be it.  Ironically, when I started to let go “again” of controlling and using clay’s inherent qualities that I really fell in love all over “again” after all these years with the medium.  Inspiration, motivation, trial and error (lots of error) and process, process, process…sounds like Life to me.  In and out of love…sounds like life to me.  Needing to whack something around...sounds like Life to me.  I don’t think I’d have survived as a diamond cutter.  Just think one slip and ooops you’re out of a job, a career and in debt up to your caret.  Sounds like life to me!