Can I Be an Artist?

You may have asked yourself: Can I be creative?; can I paint? Am I, in fact, an artist?

That’s a terrific question, and ironically it is one that answers itself. No one on this planet that’s filled with video games, DVD’s, taverns, books, iPods, food and drink, work and millions of other diversions would even ask themselves this unless they were really interested in art or painting. You are eliminating every other thing on the planet down to this one single activity, and this is a time in history where there are more distractions vying for your attention than ever before. The film industry alone makes billions of dollars a year keeping people diverted from reality. When you could be hanging out with friends, seeing a movie, traveling or who knows what else what you are instead doing is asking yourself, “Can I be an artist?”

No one but an artist would even ask this question. This question that may seem so important to you even to the point that you might be embarrassed to even admit it to others means nothing to someone who isn’t interested in art. People that do not want to create art would never think to ask this question in the first place, or care what the answer was. That you care about this question demonstrates by the very asking that you have the proclivity to be an artist.

The second thing you may say then is, “what I was really asking is do I have enough talent to be an artist? Am I creative? Do I have enough natural ability to even make art?”

I don’t care if you can draw a straight line or even walk a straight line; art is not defined by physical ability or even natural ability. This may strike you as a little odd so I will explain why I feel this way, but first I’ll prove it.

If art depended solely on natural ability then there would be no art schools, art books, art DVD’s, instructional websites or art instructors. There would be no need for them, because it is all natural ability right? So clearly and obviously, and universities are extremely happy for this because they get to charge to teach, art is not defined by natural ability. One reason for this may be because a lot of what is deemed natural ability is actually just someone who has practiced the skills needed early on. Now if you didn’t have the opportunity to get these physical skills at an early age, which are in fact extremely simple and basic, well then you will have to work on them later on. There is some work to do, which is actually a lot of fun, but there isn’t any sort of mystical artistic force at action here. You just have to work to get the pencil, crayon, stick in the mud or whatever it is that you are working with to do what it is that your brain is telling it to do. This is just basic eye hand coordination, or mind hand coordination, or if you’re not using a hand then mind computer pointer coordination – or whatever. It’s just coordination, man, Its coordination.

This leaves physical ability as a barrier; let’s use vision as an example because when we talk about the visual arts surely if any single physical ability is necessary it must be vision. This is actually correct, but vision does not come from your eyes it comes from the mind. It is the brain that makes vision – which is obvious when you think about it; if it were your eyes that were the principal factor in visualization then you would see nothing when you dreamed. Whether you agree with this or not it is still easy to see that visual acuity is not the most important factor when it comes to art. If it were then it would be incredibly easy to judge art competitions – whoever has the best vision must be the best artist. You wouldn’t even have to go to all the trouble to look at the art; just a simple eye test would suffice. This is silly of course; we all know that when we talk about ‘artistic vision’ we mean something deeper. It’s interesting how quickly we can forget this though when it comes to our own art, and believe that artistic ability is something you’re born with like a physical feature. Art comes from the mind, and just as our intellect and imagination can be expanded through use so can our artistic ability.

Art is not based on any particular sort of physicality; if you have arthritis or a bad back or don’t have arms, there are still ways for you to paint – or if painting isn’t your thing then to be creative in other ways. There are always ways because the most significant aspect of art is the mind. If you had a pie chart it of what it takes to paint you wouldn’t even be able to tell there were other categories because the mind slice is so large. It would just look like a big circle. This round circle pie chart is mind, it is you – it isn’t exactly mind over matter because in art mind is all that matters.

Okay, so we have figured out that you are an artist – you just hadn’t realized it yet, and that you have the ability – you just didn’t know it. So what you say now is, “Yeah John, but will I be any good at it?”

This is a great question. Truth is since art is important to you this is a question that you will get around to asking yourself sooner or later. This leads me into a whole different subject about judging – when to judge; when not to judge. I’m going to defer that to a different time because this is one of the most important things when it comes to the mentality needed to create art. So for now I will just say this; art comes from within you. So when you ask if your art is going to be any good, what you are really asking is how much effort you are going to put into listening to yourself and into expressing what you hear. True art is a personal statement. So if you’re not good with your art, no one else is going to be able to express what it is like to be you. What it is like to have your feelings and thoughts. The basic mechanics of art are easy; it is basically just spreading some sort of pigment around on a surface – anybody can do that. The meaning and importance of art comes from you; art is wonderful because the more you are yourself the easier and better everything becomes.