Make art every day
Five years ago, I spent a week at a “midlife wisdom school” designed to help people like me—people like you—clarify our future plans. Some of us were solopreneurs (as I was at the time) while others had full-time jobs (as I do now). A few were between careers. It’s fair to say we all were searching for something emotional or physical or professional, or we wouldn’t have been there. So we dug deep. We cried a lot. And by the end of the retreat, we each wrote one brave intention on a piece of paper. And we shared it with the group.
Mine was to “make art every day.”
This surprised my new friends, because they thought I already was making art. But I didn’t see it that way. Though I was regularly posting to my blog, and I had written most of my life, I defined art more narrowly. And though I also occasionally drew and painted, I was entirely untrained. So, I felt like an imposter artist. And I longed to be the real thing.
A few weeks later, Covid came, and everybody hunkered down. We took our art and music classes online. We cozied up in Zoom rooms. I lived in my head even more than usual. And now, here we are again. Struggling to create something wondrous from the wreckage of our despair. But things feel worse this time.
More than ever, we need beauty and we need color. We need new ways of telling old stories. We need validation that our ideas and emotions count, and I’m hoping we can prove that through painting, sculpture, film, dance, writing, photography, and theatre. We desperately need art right now. And we all—every one of us—can participate in making it.
So I suppose I’ve changed my mind about what art is and what it means to be an artist. I now believe in my bones that art is anything that’s created with imagination and intent. And an artist is anyone who writes or paints or colors or draws or dances or sings or plays on a stage. Anyone who appreciates or believes. This means that I’m an artist and so are you. We just have to think it, or whisper it, or SCREAM it, out loud!
So here are a few ways we can subvert the boring majority and make something beautiful.
Art is everywhere. Look down. Pick up a leaf or a heart-shaped rock. Look up. Notice the figures in the clouds. Every hour the light is different. Wherever you go, carry a small sketchpad and a gel pen or a mechanical pencil. Maybe a portable pan of watercolors and a brush. Try to draw what you see. This can seem intimidating at first, but any little scribble, any splash of color, is a start. Some days, it’s enough just to know I’m carrying supplies in my bag.
Art is communal. During Covid, we couldn’t easily visit museums or take classes. But now we can. Rather than holing up alone, why not seek out other makers of art? Just in the past few weeks, I’ve taken drawing and painting, and next I have a clay class. I’m re-upping my membership in the film society and the Denver Art Museum. Yesterday, I went to buy sketchbooks with a friend. We chatted up a fellow customer. We shared samples of our work on our phones. We all felt less alone.
And yes, art can be private too. When we’re home by ourselves, or sitting on a park bench scribbling, art can be a private matter. We can doodle while on Zoom and colleagues will think we’re busy taking notes. We can tuck our body of work safely in a drawer and watch it swell. What we create can be our own randy, passionate, lustful act of subversion, because we have a choice whether to share it or not. And no one but us has a vote.
Life may seem very black and white right now. There are bad guys and good guys. We live in the dark or the light.
But what if art is the thing that can bring us together? What if art can change all that?
