Everyday Canvas

Dreams and Arts

Prompt: When we look at the bigger picture and all the things we wanted to accomplish and then just never found time, it can be disheartening. Pick one thing that did happen and imagine how your life would be if you had found time for another one of your dreams instead. Would it be the same or totally different? Do things happen for a reason?

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Answering from the end question to the beginning ones, I think things usually happen haphazardly. I am not, however, denying the possibility that a higher being might have planned them for us, as such planning, professedly, might have happened to me, but if so, why the insistence on the free will? You see, each question leads to others that our tiny minds cannot answer. Life is a puzzle we can only solve, if at all, when we step back and look at things from a higher elevation.

Maybe I am not much of a dreamer because I usually did what I wanted to do, at least tried living a dream for a while, and if it wasn’t doable, I let it go. I am not the kind of person who’d cry after lost dreams because what I might have dreamt at one time or another, I've let that dream go, knowingly.

Looking back, I’d seesawed between staying with the academia or having a family; the two weren’t compatible at the time and with my circumstances. I chose family and I am not unhappy about letting the other option go, especially when I come across material written in academic mumbo jumbo or the miseducation such a path sometimes can offer. If I had picked that option instead, things would be totally different; my life would be duller and possibly my personality would suffer, and this is not sour grapes either.

Prompt: What does art mean to you? Write anything you want about art.

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Art is nostalgia for beauty, the beauty we each define for ourselves. Practically everyone can be an artist for art in its loosest definition is creative activity born out of human skills and imagination. Art can be expressed through many mediums, such as music, writing, visual or auditory arts, and creativity in all areas. To call only painting and related processes arts is unfitting. A person can be an artist in any area and not only in painting.

As such, taking up painting is the handiest excuse for being an artist. You say you are an artist, in such a case, and people may or may not believe you or they may accuseyou for being a wannabe or a pseudo-artist.

Yet, who can determine what a true artist is? I'd say, better be a pseudo-artist than shrugging off the arts totally. Does anyone do that, you might ask, and I have to answer, yes, but only rarely, as I have met such people who didn’t recognize the love of the arts within themselves or in others. Such people have looked down upon artists for not making enough money—in their minds, for not being successful enough in life. Such people have evaded the process of seeing themselves in things that are not them. Such people have taken any imitation as art, sometimes correctly and sometimes not.

In The Republic the dialog between Socrates and Glaucon answers some of the questions that might arise as to painting being the imitation of life.

“Socrates: Which is the art of painting designed to be—an imitation of things as they are, or as they appear—of appearance or of reality?

Glaucon: Of appearance.

Socrates: Then the imitator…is a long way off the truth…”

Socrates has a point here as we cannot possibly imitate nature or what we see around us as it exactly is, but we can certainly load it with our personal truths, doubts, passions, and ways of seeing things. As Oscar Wilde said, “Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.”

To me, art is the only serious thing in the world, no matter which form it takes.