When I was reading my posts about The Enneagram, I noticed that I had a serious issue that I had difficulty defining. I was always talking about "the missing thing" or "the thing I'm not getting." I complained that much of my art seemed whiny and unsophisticated.
This one paragraph in particular made an impression on me.
"It feels like if I want to be upset, I can only express myself in a mature kind of way. It has to be through well written poetry, or songs. But you know, sometimes I can't make my sadness worth anything. I can't push my emotions through some grinder and mold them into something beautiful. It's just pain."
There are a number of things I interpret from this. First of all, I wanted to use art as a way of justifying my negative tendencies instead of actually coping with them.
"If my art is beautiful, then who cares that I'm poorly behaved?"
Secondly, I had the idea that good art would sprout from me automatically because I had strong feelings.
"Artists are sad and creative. I am also sad and creative.
Therefore, I would make a good artist."
When I was younger, I fell into a lot of the fallacies of the artistic psyche. One of those fallacies is that good art stems from emotional instability.
You can cite many examples of great artists who were emotional disasters. However, you cannot trust raw emotion alone to make art. You also need technical abilities.
Art is the combination of emotional profundity and technical ability. Each entity by itself is not art. Emotional profundity is therapy. Technical ability is design.
One of the difficulties of being an artist is balancing emotional involvement. You have to work with emotion to make art interesting and profound. On the other hand, you also need to be emotionally detached so you can handle criticism. Sometimes, you have to switch between the two quickly. It's very tricky, and for people who aren't solid, it can definitely knock them off their rocker.
With The Enneagram, I struggled with the disparity between my taste and my ability, which all young artists deal with. Additionally, I expected my art to give me some kind of emotional cleansing through personal expression. I was disappointed when this didn't happen.
In truth, good art can only happen when you stop talking about how you specifically feel, and instead move into the realm of describing abstract feeling and thought. Good art doesn't cleanse you like therapy does, but it will make you feel very good about yourself for accomplishing something. Maybe you'll discover new facts about yourself along the way.
No comments:
Post a Comment