For a while I confused art with profound feeling. I could not appreciate the planning, trial, and error that must go into making a successful work. I had the temperament and sensitivity to be an artist, but not the dedication.
It's not just a matter of time. It's a willingness to sit in hard feelings, to feel uncomfortable. It's a willingness to risk it all in order to see more clearly. It's a state of being that is as much dream as reality, and as much future and past as present. Three dimensions are rendered in two. All of complex reality is merged into word or image.
2 comments:
This is a question that's torturing me. What does it actually take to bring something to fruition, as opposed to the euphoric flash of the initial idea? I'm not unwilling to sit, to stew in frustration, to haul my laptop every day to a different cafe and still get nowhere. But after a while I have to ask myself, do I not really have the stuff of a true artist inside me? Why can't I execute? It's beginning to seem farcical that I literally can't "do" the one thing I've always thought I was meant to "do".
Quotation marks just for emphasis.
But you're saying you've wrestled with the same issue and come to the conclusion you could do something else. You didn't continue to bang your head against a brick wall.
Sorry for the extended delay in my answer:
I did decide to do something else, but I still hope to create art.
And I still don't know how to create something I'm satisfied with, that I think really expresses something. I feel like the best art should deliver a sublime or revelatory effect. I have never quite managed this. I would really like to . . .
this is like that Henry Fool movie you lent me. The heroic character's opus was awful. I guess the movie is a metaphor for a writer's fear that his work, which he feels so pure and passionate about, is putrid.
Hope the above is comprehensible. It's late, and I had an exam earlier.
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