A Living Language

Looking inward

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”

– Aristotle

I am in my happy place, as my brush loads paint onto the canvas and thus weaves a spell on me. Yet the corner of my ear catches something that interrupts the magic. My oil painting teacher says he wants his art to be in museums one day. The statement jars me out of my reverie.

“He is ruining my mojo,” I think.

Years later, I still see his perception as faulty.

During visits to art museums, I am always awestruck by the incredible works of artists. When I am in a museum, I take in as many works as possible and stand amazed at the artists’ techniques including brushstrokes, innovative methods, and colors. I also wonder about the mental and physical process each artist must have gone through to create her art. And I wonder if the artist enjoyed his craft.

But I don’t buy into the notion that art becomes more meaningful when it graces museum walls.

Visual art is more powerful than this.

Art is a living language, and everyone who partakes or even entertains the idea of creating is an artist. Art is welcome in the world because the universe needs all kinds of perspectives and ideas. And, like a grand party, everyone’s work is invited into this world.

As an artist, it feels wonderful to finish a piece, but, for me, the power lies in creating art. Dear readers, if you’ve been reading my Substack for awhile now, you know that, for me, the process of creating art is everything. I create art for selfish reasons – it feels good to create, and I enjoy challenging myself. But I also create art to help build community between me and my viewers, fellow artists, as well as to evoke emotions.

Rather than aspire to have my finished artwork hanging among the great pantheon of artists, I would rather live through my art by continuing to weave the spell that keeps me creating. If my main goal is to become a well-known artist, to have people academically dissect my art and pontificate about it, the spell, the hold, that creating art has on me will be shattered.

And, as I’m writing this piece, I am thinking about the idea of legacy after I leave this Earth. While part of my legacy might be the art I create, my greater hope is to be remembered by how I treated others in my lifetime.

And if my art makes viewers feel something, that’s nice, too.

***

I’ve been suffering from insomnia for quite a long period of time, thanks to our troubling times. I usually wake up these days around 1 a.m. to 2 a.m., and find myself unable to get back to sleep despite a plethora of remedies – and therefore I have been frustrated, exhausted, and stressed out.

One day this week, after I woke up at 1 a.m., I took a different approach. Instead of getting upset, I needed to relax. So I turned to art in the middle of the night. And I decided to do a watercolor draft, seen below. This made me feel better, and before I knew it, I felt soothed.

Also this week, I reworked my night-sky clouds and surprised myself; the painting turned out much differently than I ever imagined it. I took an organic approach and just started playing with brushstrokes and colors, and I realized that the Magenta was a bit too strong a color for the dark in an evening sky. I needed to tone it down a notch, and, before I knew it, I was painting mountains in a night landscape with a comet and a swirl of stars. The layer I previously painted adds a nice texture to this draft.

A word about the color of the mountains: I mixed Cyan and Magenta and got this beautiful, dark purple. And I audibly “oohed” and “ahhhed” at the magnificent color that unfolded before my eyes. A while ago my daughter told me about mixing these colors, and I’m so glad I did this.