What Do Artists Do - Why Do They Create?
"There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman..." Emile Zola to Cézanne
One of the most difficult things to understand about art as we look at the wild variations of ideas about twenty-first century art is; why do artists create their art. Students often ask me if they are all on drugs. No of course not. Art is a reaction to the society and the times of the artists. This is not a perfect world. Art is about more than a reaction to the beautiful. As Rob Zombie described, art is not safe.
Thank goodness artists are creative thinkers! Mans’ flight to the moon was created long before technology was developed through fiction. So are most of our technological advancements. Look to Star Track the next time you pick up your cell phone.
What Do Artists Do
What Do Artists Do
- Artists Create Places for Some Human Purpose
Frank Lloyd Wright was just this type of artist. He wrote, “Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.”
His buildings and his ideas have been studied and applied by architects for more than one hundred years. His sensitivity to the environment and the buildings are summed up in the following statement. ”No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.”
- Artists Create Extraordinary Versions of Ordinary Objects
Chuck Close creates ten foot heads that are both realistic and decorative. They are truly extraordinary. Close said this about his paintings, "The idea was to make something that was so large that it could not be readily seen as a whole... as if they were Gulliver's Lilliputians crawling over the surface of the face, falling into a nostril and tripping over a mustache hair."
- Artists Record and Commemorate
Artist Robert Henri wrote about his experiences with creating art from studying and recording the human form. "There is nothing in all the world more beautiful or significant of the laws of the universe than the nude human body... When we respect the nude we will no longer have any shame about it."
- Artists Give Tangible Form to the Unknown
- Artists Give Tangible Form to Feelings and Ideas
- Artists Refresh our Vision and Help us to See the World
How do you see the world around you? Do you look through “ rose colored glasses” and see only the good in people? Or do you look through gray gloomy lenses and see a dark depressing world? Artists try to get us to see the world in a new way.
Twentieth Century painter Paul Klee writes about the truth in his vision about the art of portraiture. “Some will not recognize the truthfulness of my mirror. Let them remember that I am not here to reflect the surface (this can be done by the photographic plate), but must penetrate inside. My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones."
Through art we see the world in someone else's eyes. This world is rapidly changing and the artistic reflection of this world is often difficult to see without considering the artistic vision. Artists allow us to see the world in earlier times before we were alive.
Through art we see the world in someone else's eyes. This world is rapidly changing and the artistic reflection of this world is often difficult to see without considering the artistic vision. Artists allow us to see the world in earlier times before we were alive.