What is the truest essence of art?

Hello my name is Joseph Scribble. This is my first blog post and I won’t lie, I feel a bit intimidated. Sometimes just deciding to start something new feels so large and daunting. But for most of my life I have loved writing and literature so I feel like this may just come naturally to me if I begin to let go. Allowing a flowing stream of consciousness to come out of me.

I have been thinking a lot recently about how others perceive art versus a person who has an artistic, imaginative, creative and abstract mind. I can think about it for hours and I do. I’m obsessed with art, spirit and the unknown and how they all relate to one another.  Things that I may never know unless I could literally tap into someone else’s mind.

An example of my  personal experience would be when I’m trying to make a piece of art. The Act of Creation is so personal and solitary for me that I become really dialed in and zoomed into the details and mistakes I feel I’ve made on a piece of work. For this reason I think it makes it a lot harder for me to see the bigger picture when I look at my art. It’s hard for me to examine it as a whole when you’re looking at all the tiny details. So when I start thinking of this it always comes around to how do other people see my art? And then snowballs down into a larger thought of how do the people who seem to generally dislike many forms of Art (or think it’s pretentious or whatever criticism they have) see art?

I feel like the more logical or analytical person tends to look at how realistic the art appears and then that determines how good it is in their eyes. Therefore hyper realism and portraits become one of the finest and highest forms of art to many people. Like the work of classical and renaissance masters. 

I am fascinated with this because I completely disagree. There is no doubt so much talent, time and effort goes into those very realistic paintings so I would never argue that it is not beautiful art. They’re all gorgeous and attractive and I would definitely love to own a piece that emulates that. But overall I was never very inspired by an artist like DaVinci or Michelangelo when I was very young.

Although their work and other artists like him is undeniably masterful, it was always been the people like Picasso, Pollock, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and other more abstract and emotionally expressive artists who truly inspired me. For me I could truly feel their work in my chest. I want and wanted to explore their creative worlds that aren’t real or that we can’t access or that I can’t see without another person’s eyes. 

If we continue along the path of how I saw art with the eyes of a child I quickly (like many other children) became very obsessed with cartoons, animation, comics, and video games. There was a real tangible world (or at least it felt like that) that I could sometimes even interact with right in front of me! Stories and adventures and episodes exploring things that usually didn’t even exist or doing things that weren’t physically possible. Cartoon physics like you would see in Looney Tunes was so captivating to me.

Without going too deeply into every show I loved that made me feel something, the base thought was “Oh my God.. you can do anything in art. You can do and see anything in these worlds if you focus on creating them.” I can’t say I remember exactly when it was but the moment the thought of “What is real art? What is good art?” left my mind, but there was now much more relief and my appreciation for art only grew. It’s all in the eye of the beholder and all those art world sayings lol.

So as I got older I really started to develop this outlook that children can and do really paint and draw some of the purest forms of art. So can any untrained artist in my opinion but the difference is the adolescent or adult tends to feel much more pressure to even begin the act of creation. Children typically just begin to paint and draw and express themselves without the fear of criticism or judgement. Yes, of course it doesn’t look like they have studied composition, color theory, perspective, etc… but ultimately this child was expressing what they wanted to express very directly.

For instance if they draw a dog, a sun and a house it may not look like the real thing but they have still done a pretty great job conveying the picture in their mind onto paper. Now that is art… communication, presence, feeling, expression. Squares and circles and triangles that all come together to form a rudimentary image. Beautiful art doesn’t need to be detailed, epic and grand. It just primarily just needs to make you feel or communicate some kind of message, feeling or thought.

Things like art are very subjective and nuanced so it’s hard for me to understand when someone without these thoughts or experiences tends to judge what is good art. Typically backed with the “I could have done that.” thought process. So much art now feels forced, meticulously planned and lacking originality. Lacking real expression. To me, if I truly had an idea of what “bad art” is, it would be that. But I can obviously never take away the significance of that piece to the artist and others that relate to it. So it’s not bad to me, it’s just art, it just is. 

I feel I’ve gone on fairly long now so I will cut it off here for today lol. I want to pick back up on this subject and hopefully write more soon in the next entry. I appreciate if you have read this far. Maybe you can make some art if you typically don’t and send it my way! I’d love to see the pieces people come up with. Also any feedback is much appreciated.  Sending out lots of love.

SCRIB

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