The thing about Art

On a walk through LACMA one day, in a dark room full of Picassos and rich, emotionally-charged color, I thought about the way that people sometimes comment on technically-simplistic art. You know the kind of art, that looks to be in the style of a child, and how they say "I could do that." 

While maybe they could do that, would they? Do they? 

It's only through the act of doing that any piece of art can come to be. And it's the creative act that makes someone an artist. They're the ones that do. This very thought came to me over a year ago and it remained that way, dormant in the archives, until I sat down to write it.  

Sometimes thoughts will twirl around in our heads about a book we'd like to write, or a project, or a new invention even. But how often do we get to experience putting the brush to the canvas, or sitting down to write a new piece? The life of an artist seems so idyllic when you only picture it in your head. 

I've made judgements before about people who create and thought, I could do that. In fact one of my favorite pastimes in my early twenties was talking poorly a particular person I went to high school with. My friends and I would laugh and comment on the speaking career he embarked on after she dropped out of college. He travelled around the country giving talks as we sat on the sidelines wondering how they let him in. He even wrote a book. We wondered, about WHAT?! with so little experience, and at that young age. 

Of course the joke was on us, because while we were cackling to ourselves over drinks, he gained momentum. With seemingly no credentials, he shamelessly promoted himself and eventually built himself a marketing company by leveraging his social media following. 

I've not read his book, and it might not be my cup of tea, but I can appreciate now what kind of an undertaking that would be. And like the saying goes, 'when you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.' If you feared forever about what people might think, you'd never make a thing. 

Someone else I once knew as an actor decided that he would transition into making his own films. Initially I thought that what he was doing was so cringy, making one low budget horror movie after the other, that I wanted to avert my eyes. I thought of myself as being more sophisticated and of a higher echelon than him because I worked on higher caliber films, albeit in a much smaller role. 

I'd never even come close to that sort of an undertaking, like that of producing an indie movie. He kept at it, relentlessly producing one after another and they progressively grew in scope until he began making his own mega feature films that starred major Hollywood actors. Imagine if he had been so scared about what I thought of his low budget movies that he never started out.

Where would he have been now? Maybe part of the camp that looks at art while sitting on their couches and going, "I don't understand the fuss. I could have done that."

Artists, my simple wish for you is that you would create shamelessly, without fear. That you would go full cringe and make your low-budget, no-budget movies and keep making them. That you'd sit down to your book and have the courage to divulge your thoughts, regardless of how people would perceive them. 

Only then can you cross the threshold and become an artist.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great denotations; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." Theodore Roosevelt

Books: The War of Art, The Artist's Way