The World Needs Your Art

Six months ago, I was not painting. In fact, I had not picked up a paintbrush in more than a decade.

Five months ago, I brought home some watercolor supplies and started dabbling.

Three months ago, I started painting a lot and sharing my work.

Art has been the lightning-bolt epiphany of my 2018.

I am so happy to be making art, and although I can appreciate and understand the timing of it all, I am also sad there was a decade of my life that I wasn’t.

I had two primary objections to creating art of my own: I believed it didn’t really matter (or at the least the kind of art I would make wouldn’t really matter), and I believed I was not artistically gifted enough.

The shift started when I heard Fabeku Fatunmise talk about art and how/why it matters - that art is a transmission of energy and talisman of magic. I began to see for myself how art is a portal into a language, experience, and world beyond words, how art creates a bridge into what we can access no other way.

I began to notice how art was transforming me. And then I began to imagine how I might take the energy inside of me and make it into shapes, forms, and images on paper too.

Suddenly, it didn’t really matter how much talent I had. I wasn’t trying to paint a picture that could be mistaken for a photograph; I was trying to take an energy inside of me and make a thing that transmitted that same power and frequency.

Art has created so much magic and connection in my life this year – as I’ve taken in others’ art and shared my own.

If you have your own objections to making whatever art calls to you, I hope you recognize those as the lies they are - and see that the world needs your art and will be a more magical and alive place if you create it.

Language, Art, and Possibility

When I was 15, I decided I was going to learn Spanish. I studied hard in school and lived in Peru for four months to make that happen, and learning (and more or less retaining) Spanish remains one of the life accomplishments I’m most proud of and thankful for.

Language is a dazzlingly gorgeous thing.

Held within any language is an entire universe. I quickly found that learning Spanish was not a simple acquisition of skill. It was a newfound connection to millions of people and many more throughout time. Entire lives and civilizations lived and died inside this container of words.

Language holds so much. Power. History. Culture. Connection.

As I learned, I was incrementally granted access to whole new schemas of meaning and frameworks of reality. My brain sprouted new pathways. There were also Spanish-induced changes to my embodied self. The muscle memory of my mouth, cheeks, and tongue shifted so much while I was in Peru that when I return to the states, I stuttered and stammered for awhile in the aftermath of the abrupt transition from Romantic to Germanic, as English came less easily out of my face.

We need languages, all sorts of them, including those beyond words to express, create, connect, and decipher. They are the “ways in” to what we know, feel, experience, and desire.

I’m learning that art is one of those essential languages. It conveys what is wordless but real, formless but present. It opens dimensions and perspectives words cannot.

I suddenly became fascinated with art a few months ago when I was introduced to the idea of art as talisman (h/t Fabeku Fatunmise) - an object that holds and transmits power, meaning, and possibility. Inspired, I commissioned a piece and purchased another, and then I wondered: wait, could I do this?

The answer is yes. We can all do this.

So I did, and I am, and it is changing me and my world as much as Spanish did.

Just as there is power in our words, there is power in our art. There is power in expression and creation of all kinds.

So what wants to become fluent within you? Which languages want to be spoken through you? And what bridges between self and world will you construct next?