These are all questions that, as an artist, take a lifetime to answer, so I want to be clear about that, but I find I still must address these questions each and every day. As both an art-maker and viewer, I think about them.
What is Art?
This question is a difficult one for scholars and critics, let alone the practicing studio artist. As a studio artist who has worked consistently to improve her methods and techniques, I would like to think that my art may someday be worthy of the title and that I may someday be truly worthy of the title of Artist (next to the likes of Leonardo or Picasso, everything is relative!)
As I consider this difficult subject, I am humbled and exhilarated, open, yet overwhelmed by the things that confront me on a daily basis; facts, figures, and feelings, possibilities and problems...the poetry and prose of daily life which form the "canvas" upon which every piece of art is built, and to which every piece of art refers.
One of my art school electives was supposed to help us integrate all of this and to avoid the "fear of the blank canvas". As such, I remember one of my favorite professors at the Washington University School of Art talking about how to find a "thread" into an idea which could eventually weave the fabric of a piece of art. The course he taught was called "Conceptual Methods", and my professor was a genius at approaching this topic (more on that another time). I gained many valuable tools from this course, but more than anything, I realized that the old adage, "Art imitates life" now, and will always, answer the question, "What is Art?" for me.
A concrete (forgive the pun) example of this occurred one afternoon. I was taking a walk after a rain. The road was still rather wet, but had begun to dry in places, forming interesting patterns of wet and dry shapes, lines that intersected and disappeared into the pavement. I knew they would never be seen again, and I was awed by those designs. Art that surprises; art that is compelling...that sidewalk would have gotten an A+ in the course! "Consider the lilies...they toil not, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these..."
The next pressing question (which I have often asked myself) then, becomes, why make art at all, if nothing is more beautiful than the natural world? The natural world inspires our human experience and informs it, as I said before. Its beauty inspires, its frankness informs, and we as artists are asked to make some sense of it all for ourselves. We are lucky if we can communicate any of it to others, through the filter of our own lens of experience and the limitations of our senses and training. But try we must, for it is our life's blood and without it we shrink into a dehydrated version of what we once felt and experienced. Therefore, it is partly the need to create that continues to drive us onward.
The other part of the equation addresses the question; Who cares about art? This is where philosophical arguments of the most basic form can come back to haunt, and where a schizoid split of sorts between the philosophical and the practical come to the fore. With questions like; Is it our works that matter, or the ideas behind the thoughts? Should the work communicate clearly the artist's intention; ie, should it read like a billboard ad for the artist's methods or point of view? Or should the artist use purple just because he or she likes it? What part does the market for art play in determining what gets sold and therefore produced?
These are all questions that food for artists' marketing websites, books, and DVD's; for galleries and collectors, blogs (like mine) and Blogoshperes. In that sense, we are not operating in a vacuum. In that sense, a collective is formed; a worldwide web of art ideas, interests, perceptions.
In the end, we are left once again with questions that invite answers, and answers that create questions...and the beauty of it all is that the search continues to bring a fresh breeze to all our lives.
