Being an artist as a full time job is a relatively new concept. In the past it was often considered to be something you did in your spare time, such as painting or writing poetry. This led to a lot of confusion and people who excelled at what they did were often regarded with suspicion.
These days most people accept the idea that there are some people who make their living from the arts. However, this has created a whole new set of problems for young artists trying to establish themselves.
This blog is here to help you cut through all the waffle and find out what it really takes to become an artist. It takes dedication and hard work, but no one said that being an artist was going to be easy. So start now and don’t give up until you have achieved your dream.”
Art is a verb and art is a noun.
Art is a verb, it’s what you do, it’s how you think about the world. Art is a noun, it’s something you can make, something that can be sold.
It seems to me that artists who spend too much time being artists (as opposed to doing or thinking of themselves as one) tend to forget this and lose sight of why they’re doing what they do in the first place.
So this blog is really just part of my attempt to remind myself why I’m an artist.**
There is no such thing as a professional artist. There are painters and writers and musicians, but they are not artists. An artist is someone who creates a new concept of being in the world, a new way of interacting with reality and with others.
The word
Art is an elusive concept, and the word is often used to describe things it shouldn’t, which leads to a lot of confusion. This blog will attempt to clarify what art is, and how it can be defined.
But first, we need to define what art isn’t. Art is not about being creative; it’s about being expressive. It’s not about making something no one has ever made before; it’s about interpreting something that someone else has already made in your own way. A picture of a sunset is art only if you see something in the picture that other people haven’t seen before. This may seem obvious, but it’s easily forgotten when talking about art, because the technical skill involved in creating the object–the brushwork, or the choice of colors–is so much easier to talk about than what its creator was trying to express.
On this blog I’ll try to state as plainly as possible what I think art is and what makes it good or bad, and also why artists use some of the techniques they do.* I’ll try not to spend much time on technical questions such as how perspective works or why some colors go together well and others don’t, because there are already many books on those subjects available to those who want them. And
The purpose of my art is to communicate how I feel about the thoughts and experiences that I encounter. I do this by using different techniques and mediums as well as tangible elements that stimulate emotion and thought.
I am an artist because I have passion for what I do, a strong desire to share my ideas, feelings and emotions with others, and a willingness to work hard to get my work out there. It is not easy being an artist because you are constantly creating new things or improving on old ones. But in the end it all pays off. You can see your artwork in people’s eyes when they see it or hear it or read it. They become part of your experience and you theirs.
To the untrained eye, some things look like art while others do not. But this is because of what they look like, not what they are. In fact, if you know what to look for, it is easy to see that everything is art.
Just what is an artist? An artist is someone who makes things that seem pretty to other people. This must be true because everyone agrees on which things are art and which aren’t. They might disagree about how good a particular thing is, but they will agree that it is art. The only qualification for being an artist is that you make something people recognize as such.
No one can define art in general, but many people have tried to define it in particular cases: “Art is what I say it is.” “Art must be challenging.” “Art should express emotion.” “Art should be technically proficient.” All these definitions are wrong because they give necessary conditions — conditions without which something cannot be art — instead of sufficient conditions — conditions that are necessary and sufficient. The only definition of art that works with all the examples we have seen so far — good and bad, ugly and beautiful — is simply: “art is anything someone says it is.”
Proof: Art cannot be a concept since concepts are ideas
