Who is an Artist?

So lets get the formalities out of the way...
Why a blog?

Because I love jennysuespeaks. I'm always left with so much to chew on, have a million ideas to share. To leave a comment long enough to capture all that I want to say seems, well annoying to other readers, and frankly, so hard to edit in the comment box that I can't articulate my thoughts precisely. So you may consider this an homage. Whatever you give me to think about, I'll take it as free license to ramble. On and on and on and on. (Me? No, never!)

So I saw a new post on freedom today, but I'm still reeling from the artist post, so I'll have to respond to the new one another day.

I think this is a topic we've discussed a lot, so forgive me if some of this is a rehash.

I kind of think I hear two different ideas in this desire to be artistic. The first one is a desire to express one's innermost thoughts. The second is a desire to make a mark on the world...to advance the world's collective progress one small step by doing something truly original that nobody has done before and that others can build upon.

I actually find the first, the desire to express oneself, most compelling. From a biological point of view, the human brain is the biggest, most complex and most advanced of any animal. I read (part of, I confess) an interesting book a while ago: The Myth and the Machine: Technics and Human Development, by a guy named Lewis Mumford. It was a hard read, but pretty interesting. His basic premise was that the biggest technical advancement that humans have made is not tools, fire, computers, but the development of language. That to overcome the isolation of living in our heads to develop a means of communicating with each other and to future generations is a stupendous achievement. He characterizes life before language as similar to our dreams; we lived in constant fear and confusion due to the inability to comprehend the world around us and to separate fantasy from reality. He proposes that language helped us to work together to make sense of the world around us.

Ok, so what does this have to do with art? I was thinking that if the development of a verbal language was so paramount and so difficult, and yet we overcame these difficulties because of a need to express ourselves, perhaps artistic mediums are further satisfying the need to express ourselves from parts of the brain that aren't salved by mere everyday verbal expression. For instance, why does music touch the brain so powerfully that to even try to describe the sensation verbally is clumsy and why is this sensation so exciting? Is this an area of the brain unexplored by verbal expression? (saw this interesting interview in the Times yesterday on a researcher that studies neurology and music).

So, again, getting back to art.... I guess I'm really thinking of creativity, not art. How do I differentiate them? By creativity, I mean unhindered expression through some medium. By art, I mean a finished product. So, creativity... I guess I think that to be creative, the reason that JSue's artist friends talk about a process is because it takes practice to master whatever non-verbal medium you choose as your creative outlet. You're learning a new language, which takes practice, a process.

But that brings up another question in my mind... Are you learning a new language (music, painting, dancing, writing) so that you can express vague ideas that already exist in your head or does the learning of the language create ideas that didn't previously exist? I'm not sure. I like to consider my guitar playing as an example to think about. Before I learned guitar, I never imagined being able to write my own music. But as I built my knowledge of the instrument, I found that I did have musical ideas that I wanted to express. I never sat down to "think" of these ideas on an intellectual level. It was more like, for the first time, I was sensing where I wanted the instrument to take me. (Unfortunately, I've never practiced enough to be able to get most of these thoughts out of my fingertips, but I could feel them just there, almost at the surface, and occasionally I succeeded). I'm convinced that these musical ideas didn't exist until I learned the "language" of the instrument, or if they did, they were so vague and buried that I couldn't articulate them. Somehow learning scales and other seemingly mindless, repetitive, non-creative tasks caused me to find a creative outlet for thoughts I didn't even know I had. Guitar, music, music, guitar, chickens, eggs, eggs, chickens, bla bla bla.

Ok, I think I've rambled enough, so I won't attempt to tackle question number 2 about making your mark on the world.

But I will say that I think you've got awfully nice peau. And not to be judgemental... but lots of people like to have cool sounding careers... Maybe that just means they wanted to impress you, and you could take that as a compliment :-)