“When you start on a long journey, trees are trees, water is water, and mountains are mountains. After you have gone some distance, trees are no longer trees, water no longer water, mountains no longer mountains. But after you have traveled a great distance, trees are once again trees, water is once again water, mountains are once again mountains.
— Zen teaching”
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Surely one of the more astonishing rewards of artmaking comes when people make time to visit the world you have created. Some, indeed, may even purchase a piece of your world to carry back and adopt as their own. Each new piece of your art enlarges our reality. The world is not yet done.
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Indulge too many habits, and life sinks into mind-dulling routine. Too few, and coping with a relentless stream of incoming detail overwhelms you […] It’s all a matter of balance, and making art helps achieve that balance.
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It is an article of faith, among artists and scientists alike, that at some deep level their disciplines share a common ground. What science bears witness to experimentally, art has always known intuitively — that there is an innate rightness to the recurring forms of nature. […] But the artist, if asked whether an art piece could be remade with identical results, would have to answer no — or it wouldn’t be art. In making a piece of art, both the artist and the artist’s world are changed, and re-asking the question — facing the next blank canvas — will always yield a different answer. This creates a certain paradox, for while good art carries a ring of truth to it — a sense that something permanently important about the world has been made clear — the act of giving form to that truth is arguably unique to one person, and one time. There is a moment for each artist in which a particular truth can be found, and if it is not found then, it will not ever be. […] The world thus altered becomes a different world, with our alterations being part of it. The world we see today is the legacy of people noticing the world and commenting on it in forms that have been preserved.
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If art is about self, the widely accepted corollary is that making art is about self-expression. And it is — but that is not necessarily all it is. It may only be a passing feature of our times that validating the sense of who-you-are is held up as the major source of the need to make art. What gets lost in that interpretation is an older sense that art is something you do out in the world, or something you do about the world, or even something you do for the world. The need to make art may not stem solely from the need to express who you are, but from a need to complete a relationship with something outside yourself. As a maker of art you are custodian of issues larger than self.
Some people who make art are driven by inspiration, others by provocation, still others by desperation. Artmaking grants access to worlds that may be dangerous, sacred, forbidden, seductive, or all of the above. It grants access to worlds you may otherwise never fully engage. It may in fact be the engagement — not the art — that you seek. The difference is that making art you declare what is important.
Excerpt From: David Bayles. “Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking.”