Art is knowing that there is more than what is there in front of you. A basic element, it is not an ability but a subtlety; not a course rope capturing the bull, but kicking ordinary dust in a morning parking lot and knowing that in a time and place you almost were, something was captured beneath you. You dig with art to find out what it is. And almost always, if you plunge deep enough, there is a hidden limb below. Whether it reaches for you or you reach for it - it is you who has been captured. And somehow, the person kicking away the afternoon dust is not the same person who kicked it that morning.
Art is the risk of self-immersion into dimensions of form, thought, light, and expression. Art is our inner shadow, that, no matter how still or forgotten, has light cast upon it from our deepest places. We breathe art even if its hem does not unravel until we are too old or it is too late to throw it on to canvas or clay or stage or photograph or paper. But if we are breathing, art is too. Art is never too late.
Art is the moment when we risk feeling stupid, when we dip even the smallest cup past our cool surface and bring scalding water to our lips, or our hands, or our bellies, and then describe in some outward way how it makes us feel. Art does not heal, it exposes, and the rest of life mends what is left broken or breaks what once was fixed. Pouring salt or sugar or bandages or just letting God's air mix with our blood to close what we cannot by ourselves heal - that is the rest of this life.
Art is not the miracle, it is our attempt to explain how it happened, or why it happened, or how a cup of coffee and a conversation can mean nothing one day and then everything the next.
Art is the broken megaphone whispering "I am not perfect" and inside its echo is you.
Art is not explained well. Not to us as adults, or when we were kids, or to our kids, or even to the elderly now who graph memories like Picasso as they talk to themselves and are never told, "That is art." That we can kick dust for those who cannot kick dust themselves yet find both them and us below - that is art. The lesser of art is telling them what you found; the greater of art is them discovering what you have said.
Art is the silence of looking out the window and noticing the world, then rising up to experience it.
Art is for the sideways, for the back of the school theater room or the kids who wear elementary splattered smocks and whose clay teacup always turned out so much better than mine. We learn fast and we learn early: "Art is not for me." So we go a long and different route. But at some point in our lives we turn enough sideways and highways and back alleyways ourselves that we notice a different kind of shadow following us, an inner kind that casts opposite from the laws we know, yet subtly we know - it is there. So we pick up a pen or a camera or an instrument, a thought or a chisel or a phone, and then try to explain what we mean.
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