The simplicity of being an artist
March 21, 2023
Being an artist is the simplest thing ever — all you need to do is to announce to others or even just to yourself that you are an artist and repeating it long enough will make it stick and become a legitimate description of yourself. Being a creator that is a different matter.
I feel a need to create, that was always a constant companion in my thinking. And in my doing — although there were long periods of time when I lived in boring minutia of adult life and addiction where the only creativity I showed was in all different ways for prolonged self-destruction.
Creating doesn’t need any special effort and artistic skill — gardening or cooking or simple woodworking can be an outlet for a creative urge. It is the same with working on your body — simple exercises and diet and grooming can bring a creation of a new and better and healthier you.
Creating new levels of knowledge and understanding and imagination in your mind is such an act as well. Expanding something, in this case, a mind — is a creation of more room to fit all different and often contradictory and beautiful stimuli and emotions from the surrounding world.
There is something primeval in the urge to create. There is something fundamentally basic in the process of transferring thinking to action and labor and skill of hands. Or as it is common in my case, starting by doing something and then creating a narrative of an idea around it.
Those who create can never be bored or satisfied with the process (or life in general). Creation will be ongoing as long as there is a will and the will to create — once unleashed — will never fade. This is an amazing evolutionary gift for us, even if it is pointless from the biological point of view.
We have it, every one of us. It might lay dormant in a lot of people who are weighed down by life and its discontents. But it is there, just waiting for the first step, the first volitional act of creation of something from an idea — and any result of it is acceptable and admirable.
