What Do I Want To Say...If Anything?

There are some artists who make you think. Lately, Zom Osborne has been doing that for me. She asks questions or makes observations about her world through her artwork that cause me to pause and think about things. This is good. This is what art should do, at least to me. Which had me asking myself a few questions about my own work, the biggest being, "Why do I do it, and what do I want it to say, either about me or the world I live in?

It bothered me that my first answer to that question was, "I don't know." It bothered me even more when I realized that I have never really thought about it, or felt compelled to make, for lack of a better term, "statement" art. So, the next question I had to ask was, "If I have always thought that good art made some kind of statement or made you think of the world in a new way, why didn't I ever require my own work to say anything?" After thinking that one over long and hard, I decided the embarrassing answer was, "Because I had no idea what I wanted it to say." I do it because I enjoy it, which is fine, and because I feel compelled to do it or I feel lousy, and that is fine too, but it has never said anything, I don't think, about who I am and what I believe. I have never tried to change people's way of looking at the world, or tried to make them understand the way I view my world.

Maybe artist automatically say things through their artwork even if nothing was originally intended? I suspect the very act of creating something says something about you, no matter what you create. And, since people interpret works of art differently, maybe you end up saying something to one person, but draw a big blank from someone else.

What all this introspection boiled down to was, making me think more about my art and what I truly wanted it to say about me and how I view my world, and how I might go about making that happen. I had to dig down into my fairly shallow brain and find out what was in there worth saying. And I think I found it.

There is a line in the movie The Tempest (the old one, from the 70s) that has the main character facing an incoming storm, raising his arms, and saying, "Show me the magic." I have a favorite author, Charles de Lint, who writes of urban magic all around us, but unseen by most because they don't believe it is there. I believe it is there. I look for it. I don't always see it, but I feel it often. I'm willing to believe. That's what I want my art to show. That magic is out there — old magic, new magic, light and dark magic — and that if you would only stop and look, you would see and feel it as well.

This doesn't mean high fantasy art. I like some of that genre, but that's not what I do. I want it to be more subtle than that, and still make it work. Will I succeed in making people see what they may not believe in or can't feel? I don't know. But for me, at least it is a new focus. It is a new way to think, and that's always a good thing.