agony and art -- dancing partners

Some wag facetiously asks if making art requires suffering, and the answer is, probably, but only as practice, spiritual conditioning, the getting ready to make art. No way around it, the original part of art causes stress, in fact making anything that wasn’t there before is experienced as non-specific discomfort, and it’s a universal human condition. Life may get you ready, but at the moment of creation the experience is one of mild to severe unease, and that applies to landscapers, and engineers, and entrepreneurs, anyone who asserts their own ideas about anything, and makes something new.

Getting good at anything that requires skill can be fun, and following recipes or copying from examples, with instructor at elbow or hours of practice alone, breeds satisfaction and contentment. Diligence is rewarded, and in due time friends and acquaintances might be impressed, but any wrinkle, any flavor, or any progression of notes that wasn’t there before has a cost. I’m appealing to the reader’s personal experience for verification of this simple formula, aware that many of us avoid even rearranging the furniture just to escape it. It also seems true that very creative people sometimes attempt to assuage the anxiety they accrue with drugs and alcohol, evidence of the high price that’s paid, eventually.
 
Art is all of human endeavor distilled down to an essence. Someone has been able to compress their own aspiration, disappointment, everything they’ve ever experienced into a picture of something, and you have the ability to decipher the depth and awareness they applied when making it, it’s like a miracle or something. Really it’s a level of awareness all humans possess, but it’s also a room hardly anyone enters, waylaid by digital media, and confused by the ‘famous for being famous’ world of art. Accept that we recognize more than we realize, and that we can tell internally when the art we’re looking at resonates with our own experience, with our own angst and its resolution. Someone made this picture, and in these unsettling times, you might find it’s a comfort to have so much in common with a stranger.