© Michelangelo
I always thought you had to be like the exotic Yoko Ono to be classified as an artist. But then I remembered that painters like Goya, Da Vinci and Michalangelo, that had to make portraits to get by, and would even charge extra to paint hands and now they’re considered timeless.
In my mind, up until recently, you had to be a painter, sculpture or writer to be an artist. Musicians, photographers, designers and software developers didn’t even come into it.
Now I think everyone creates art. We have to, it keeps alive that part in our brain that despises repetition, doesn’t think in a straight line and keeps alive our imagination. You create art when you put in a bit of effort into how you present food, when you plant in your garden and when you take on a personal project at work, for the fun of it.
The whole concept of art is a completely human element. It doesn’t ensure that we live longer, eat better or keep warmer. It makes the world prettier. Our relatively large brain and our concept of time allows us to predict our own death, we will die, it’s just a matter of when. And our fear, our instinct, copes with this by creating things that will remind our predecessors of us. Building the pyramids didn’t make the Pharoahs immortal through the number of objects they carried into the afterlife, it made them immortal through the sheer size and artistry of their tombs. Thousands of years later, we remember them.
That’s what every artist tries to accomplish. All we really want is not to be forgotten by the next generation, and maybe, just maybe, the next thousand years.
