Art opens portals to timeless and exotic inner worlds. Whether looking or creating, the hours pass unnoticed – silent (but no less real) adventures befall us. Even if the effort exhausts us, we walk away a different person (more who we really are, perhaps), alive to the vast questions and wondrous details of life.
Painting is full of challenge, but also excitement, discovery, and the mysteries of creativity and imagination. From making art, a heightened interest in life follows us back into our daily chores and responsibilities, emerging if we let it long after the art supplies are stored until next time.
Becoming ever more skillful, knowledgeable, and alive to art helps us to live “deliberately,” to use Thoreau’s word. The more time you spend in that revitalized mental space, the sooner you’ll find yourself back at the easel, the wilder and more absorbing your artistic adventures will become, and the more you’ll open up and live your best creative life, in the studio and outside of it.
Many artists and teachers have advised beginners that they are best off learning the tools of art from sound sources and still, right alongside the careful studies and exercises, making wild experiments that let the “crazy artist” within come alive.
Robin Cheers, Red Umbrella, oil, 9 x 12 in.
“When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressive creature,” artist Robert Henri (he pronounced it “HEN-rye”) once told students at the New York School of art, where he taught from 1902 to 1908. Enthusiasm for the life of the artist drives the acquisition of technique, and vice versa.
What happens when you embrace the best artist that you can be affects not just your own creativity but your whole life and those around you. The person in whom the Artist has come alive, Henri says, “becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and opens ways for better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it and shows there are still more pages possible.”
“Art is, after all, only a trace,” Henri says, “like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness.”
Robin Cheers, Small Town Texas, oil, 16 x 20 in.
It’s art not as a means of earning a living, but art as a means of living life a fuller and deeper life that Henri and so many have others have held most valuable. Money and collectors will follow (or not) as the work fills with soulful expressions of a life lived “deliberately,” thoughtfully and with excitement about being alive. “Deep calls unto deep,” as Emerson said, and works of the heart and soul touch the heart and soul of another.
The more people in the world living this way, with a sense of passion and excitement, the better the world would be for us all. “Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone,” Henri said. “Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.”
George Inness believed the role of every artist is to embrace a spiritual aspect of sight, a glimpse into the overarching harmony of vision that ties existence together and, by its very nature, makes us human.
The man or woman in whom the Artist is alive becomes a vessel of emotional and spiritual content seemingly received from without. For him or her, learning technique becomes not a necessary chore but an exhilarating pursuit. However, the true goal, Henri would say, is to attain the state of elevated consciousness that makes creative expression inevitable.
Robin Cheers teaches her approach to painting in a video titled “Brushwork Secrets Unleashed.”
Art is for Everyone
Kathleen Hudson, Backlit Sky, plein air, oil, 18×24. Kathleen teaches her landscape methods in a downloadable video, Creating Atmospheric Landscapes.
Not everyone is willing or capable of acting on the creative impulse, but its wellsprings exist for all. Art is no privileged, elitist specialization. The vast majority of artists and writers living in America have full-time day jobs, often exhausting ones. And yet they’re excited about doing something meaningful, maybe even making a positive difference in someone’s life with their art. Being an artist is something available to anyone committed to living an open, freer life with courage, mindfulness, commitment, and even moments of joy.
“The passionate play goes on,” wrote Walt Whitman, “and you may contribute a verse.”
