I hesitate to call anything that I do art. For me, there is such baggage associated with that word. I'm taken immediately to 7th grade art class where everyone was busy drawing something original and interesting and I was desperately sweating, blank page in front of me, with a baffled brain devoid of any inspiration. I hopelessly was trying to catch a glimpse of what the person next to me was drawing and it turned out to be a page full of mushrooms with fingerprints turned into little mice.
I shamelessly copied that drawing. Right down to the curly mouse tails and red spots on the mushrooms.
I got a D-. And I came to believe that I couldn't "make art."
I can't draw to save my life and painting is too scary to even contemplate. To me – sewing, knitting, writing, photography and cooking have always fallen under the category of "craft." I can't be an artist – all I can do is play with words, push a camera shutter release or turn yarn into fabric.
But what if my definitions of art and craft need further exploration?
I have traditionally thought of craft as having instructions and art as something that came directly out of one's imagination. If there was a prompt, an inspiration or a challenge to create it must have been a craft because it wasn't something that came "naturally."
Maybe that needs some more thought.
Here's what I'm wrestling with now:
If I take words and record them without a sense of poetry or image it might be craft. If I wrestle with words until they arrange themselves into a beautiful representation of who I am as a person, all the things I see and feel and a likeness of the world in an exact moment of time, perhaps that is art.
And perhaps what truly differentiates craft from art may be need – the need to express myself, to put images to my experiences and ideas with words. Perhaps that could be a definition of art after all.
How about you? What's your definition of art?
1 comment:
Last week I was photographing a grain elevator in McComb, OH. I was standing beside a railroad track and just taking some generic shots, almost like a tourist, when a train came blasting down the track. Immediately, my viewfinder came alive with speed and colors and angles and I think at the point I noticed all that was going on it became art. At least it suddenly felt like art . . . and I get excited when that happens. It's hard to describe but you know it and you feel it.
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