G. Steve Journal

That's What Art Is...

Just heard an incredible interview with actor and author Wendell Pierce about returning home to New Orleans after Katrina in order to rebuild his ruined neighborhood.  He'd just finished acting in the Beckett play, Waiting For Godot, about:

… two characters searching for something to save them, define them— where have they been, where are they going — and in that play there’s a moment where one of the characters says, ”At this place and in this moment in time, all mankind is us... let us do something while we have the chance.”

And that was an epiphany for me and an awakening.  I realized that’s what art is — a form where we reflect on who we are, where we’ve been, where we hope to go… declare our values and then act on them. And so that moved me to return home to rebuild my neighborhood.

 

Object of Art

This letter from Sherwood Anderson to his son could be said about any artistic endeavor:

Learn to draw. Try to make your hand so unconsciously adept that it will put down what you feel without your having to think of your hands.

Then you can think of the thing before you.

Draw things that have some meaning to you. An apple, what does it mean? The object drawn doesn’t matter so much.

It’s what you feel about it, what it means to you.

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

Sherwood Anderson

[thanks, BP]

Desire...

... motivates so many creative endeavors -- the urge to express the feelings one has toward some aspect of the world.  That creative result -- painting, poem, symphony or photograph -- may temper that desire but not quench it altogether.  Writer Rebecca Solnit hints at an alternative:

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed?