On Love and Art

“Medicine, law, business, engineering; these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love; these are things we stay alive for.”
– Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society

Art does not have rules. It’s the expression of the soul. The only expression other than love. But isn’t love material? Apart from parental love, does not love have boundaries, limitations and dependency? But nevertheless, love is what we are alive for. Without love, we would not survive this harsh world. We would wither away as soon as we were born. During our lives, we fall in love, we fall out of love. On both occasions, at some point during the day we escape to our haven where we contemplate and scheme on how to keep the flame burning or if it’s not, how to extinguish the flame without unleashing monsters in the dark. We burn, we cry and we settle. Finally, we sing a song, write a poem or just pick up a brush and paint our problems so we can find a solution.

That is the purpose of art in our lives. It provides us an escapade from our lives’ struggles. A world which we create, a world of our own and a world where our actions and expressions are honest. A man who can lie when he creates art does not know his own self. True art is the expression of a man’s soul. His work reflects his depth, his upbringing and his tastes.

Often, an artist dwells into the unknown primarily because he’s curious about that domain. He wants to be in someone else’s shoes for a while and see the world through their eyes, see their pain and sorrows. An artist is always curious and thinking.  He looks at a crow sitting across his on a tree and he tries to think what the world is like to the crow. An artist is close to nature.

But the greatest aspect of art is the joy one gets from finishing his work. He stays up late until his work is done, perfected to the last word and till he is satisfied. An artist can never go to sleep leaving his work unfinished unless it’s something that requires many days. But the peace he finds after the work’s completion is unmatched.

We are now in the age of fusion where no one always fully satisfied with just their own domain of work. The Berlin Wall broke, so boundaries in art must break too. We have artists who draw pictures such that they seem real to the untrained eye, then we have photographers who turn their shots into a pencil sketch or fresco on Photoshop so that it resembles an artist’s work. One is happy in his own domain but strives to do what his heart thinks is beautiful but he’s not equipped to create. The age of fusion, experimentation, the urge to get out of the comfort zone and create art with which the artists’ skill is used and at the end of the day, the heart is content. The mind is at peace and the artist is devoid of all his woes.

That my friends, is the joy of art.