Art and Life

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
– Pablo Picasso

Art manifests our deepest passion, our unanswered questions and our willingness to walk on shaky ground. Attempting to segregate art from life would be like plucking the stars from the sky, holding the sea from the shore, or eliminating the subtext from your conversation. As Tim O’Brien says of his fictional memoir, The Things They Carried,  “…life gives us stuff. It gave Conrad the ocean, which he used in his stories. Life gave Updike domesticity and divorce and the suburbs, which he uses as material. And life dealt me the Vietnam card. Yet I don’t consider myself a Vietnam writer, any more than Morrison considers herself a black writer. We’re writer writers. And we use what life gives us.”

As artists and writers we continually mine our experiences, our compulsions, our obsessions, our dreams, because that’s what matters to us.

Whatever your history, it will pervade your stories, your paintings, your life. People sometimes ask what they should write about or whether it should be memoir, or fiction or poetry. The left-brain wants to have a plan, demands to know where you are headed, what you will encounter, how you will deal, and the point of destination. If I were to say write about your love, or loss, or betrayal, or what you have endured, witnessed or overcome, what you fantasize about or aspire to, your reaction would reflect the frantic calculations of the left brain’s dependence on structure and explanation. I’m guessing it would read like a court report at best. But if I were to provide a random prompt – an ironic phrase, a list of sensory words, a song title, a weather phenomenon, and ask you to just write (without thinking) then you might be on a hotline to a place that matters – a place of passion where the questions lurk, where the real story lies in wait. You would have bypassed that mind numbing interrogation and tapped a vein. Whatever you hit, your creative juices begin to flow, your demons come out to dance, and you will dare to ask the questions you might have never braved. You might be surprised what you uncover, and how you might translate that find into words or images or a blend. Instead of a story to be read or an image to be viewed, you will create a work of art to be experienced…

Art and life exist in a symbiotic relationship, not a compartmentalized state. A work of Art is inseparable from the artist or the author – and a life lived with passion, courage, and curiosity is an art form in itself.