My work may stink, but I’m an artist never-the-less

August 4, 2006

I'm an artist. My work may stink, but I’m an artist nevertheless. I came to the visual arts only recently so I’m still struggling every day with developing my skills, managing various media, and learning the rules of perspective and form, and I’m fighting frustration because I can’t yet express my vision the way I want to express it.

But it’s not the ability to reproduce the visual world in two dimensions or carve it perfectly into stone that matters with art, anyway. It’s the vision that animates the work, and the most technically skilled work of art is not art if it does not express the artist’s vision.

What do I mean when I say the word “vision?” I believe that everyone experiences the world in a unique way, and so each of us lives inside of slightly different realities. Our realities include our sensory experiences and the content of our lives, as well as what we believe about human nature and the nature of life-on-earth, about the human condition, about our eating and washing, our lovemaking and war-making and childbearing and god-speaking and tool designing, and ten thousand other things. This reality is our vision.

We live in a highly conforming culture. In the United States, a great deal of our experiences—realites—visions are the same. Homogenization (McDonaldization as some have called it) is flattening our world so that we tend to speak the same way, eat the same foods, and dress like everyone else. We are taught the same things in schools, model ourselves on the same TV shows, hear the same stories, do the same things for fun, and in every way come to resemble one another more and more.

There is tremendous pressure to conform. If we don’t match the group reality, we may be marginalized, pathologized, criminalized, or laughed or condescended back into line. A quick example is the energetic kid more interested in catching crayfish than “preparing for the standardized assessment tests” who is labeled ADHD and drugged into conformity. Eccentricity is no longer considered benign. There is no place for difference.

An artist is a person who rebels against conformity, who claims his or her vision and shouts it out loud.

Even if you are a highly conforming “ordinary” person, there is some piece of your world that is special to each of you, and your special piece is your unique vision. If you share that vision, you become an artist.

Some people may think that unless we all see alike, there will be no peace, but if we all see alike, we will no longer be fully human. I believe that peace will come when each of us shares our unique visions. We must each become artists, and discover what is special in us, and share that with others. Every vision is necessary to the whole, and in the coming together of the visions of every member of a community, the community forms its culture, its reality, its ways of being in the body, on the earth. Is your vision on the television set? Is your heaven talked about in church? Is your future of peace and abundance considered possible in this crazy dominator marketplace world? If not, then become an artist and share what you see.

This sharing, whatever form it make take, will be art. You can express it visually, in writing, with dance, music or theater, and even in the way you live and interact every day. A person who has a vision that fires him and drives her, and who works hard to express that vision in form, that person is an artist, whether technically skilled or not.

Best wishes,
Lilly