life is art ~ art is life

"If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud."
~ Emile Zola

somewhere in the last year or so i misplaced my desire to experience life.  i have been avoiding, hiding, tolerating and surviving. this blog is my attempt to revive my passion and hunger to exist and create and genuinely live...and seek my personal voice for expressing the art i hope is inside me.  seeking to write about life will force me to live it.  Henry David Thoreau said, "How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."  i have lived some, but there is still a lot of living to do.  i have written some, but there is still a lot of writing to do.  but not only writing.  painting, photography, dancing, singing, cooking, and experiencing the art that others create.

i dedicate this blog to the study and pursuit of art in all its diversity and beauty and expressions of truth.  i work in a museum of history and art.  i am surrounded by natural and man-made art every moment of my life.  i have art spinning around me, welling up inside of me and attempting to burst out of me.  words, photographs, paintings, food, music, nature, dance, people, life!

life can and should be an art form.

my previous blogs lacked direction so they ended up being places to ramble, vent, complain, share too much personal information, and vainly seek approval and validation.  i stopped writing on my blog because i didn't like what i had to say...and the way i chose to say it.  i stopped writing because i thought no one cared what i had to say, and i forgot that it doesn't matter if anyone cares or not.  what matters is that i am a writer, and a writer writes whether anyone is reading or not because, “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity" (Franz Kafka).  i have felt the monster and the insanity recently, and so i must write. i stopped writing because i had very little to write about except my pain and misery and i forgot how to write about it in a dignified and artistic way. talking about life's difficulties when said in one way is merely complaining, when said another way, disaster and despair become art.  The great poet John Keats said, “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”  pain and hardship are realities of life, the way a person lives and copes with the realities of life can be an artistic expression of a beautiful soul.  Lloyd Alexander said, "Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way to understand it."

Thomas Merton said, "Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."   so much of the time i feel lost, but being lost isn't the problem, being lost without purpose and without a map or some sense of which direction to go is the problem.  writing and art, for me, become a candle and a map to lead me through the dark places and into the light.  i hope that through this blog you can experience something uplifting and/or enlightening whenever you visit.

i haven't settled on a title for my blog yet.  blogger won't let me leave it untitled, but it's not set in stone just yet. titles are usually the last thing i write.  i have to because acquainted with the piece before i know what to call it.  suggestions are welcome.

one last quote, this from one of my very favorite artists; Vincent van Gogh said, "It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done."