Creating Art With Meaning
I was recently at a restaurant in San Francisco having a conversation with an artist about creating art with meaning.
She is a wonderful watercolorist and loves to paint objects and landscapes, capturing the seemingly mundane props of our lives with a talented knack for color matching and transmuting objects onto paper.
But she was feeling distressed about the value of her Art. Her distress was coming from the fact that she didn’t feel as if her Art “said” anything, that it wasn’t Art with meaning.
“What does my Art say?” she wondered aloud as I sipped my coffee and her eyes grew sadder, “painting a bottle of steak sauce doesn’t mean anything.”
Finding the Meaning of Art
It’s a thought and a feeling nearly every artist has at some point in their creative lives; What does my Art mean?
What’s the message? Is there a message? Does it have any power? Why am I doing this? Is there any sense in creating this thing?
These are big questions that every artist must ultimately answer for themselves.—but I will tell you what I told this dear artist that night in San Francisco; create from your own internal catalyst and your Art will always be Art with meaning.
Sound trite?
Sound like some flimsy shallow answer meant to make a fellow artist feel better?
It isn’t.
It’s a tried and true method of creating, and, in my opinion, the only way to create.
I asked this painter to think about her internal experiences.
What do they feel like? What is it like to exist as her every day? What does the world look like through her eyes?
And if she had to turn those feelings, thoughts, and experiences into paintings, what might they look like? What geometric shape would they take? What colors would they contain? How big would the pieces be? How detailed?
At first, there was some resistance.
“But often all I feel inside is a grey box,” she protested.
Ah!
Perfect!
Draw a grey box!
Draw scores of grey boxes!
Draw them in landscapes, in garbage cans, stacked on top of one another.
Create as many shades of grey as you can and fill your boxes with them. Create 3D boxes, 2D boxes, people with boxes for heads, boxes falling out of the sky, boxes at the Ocean, the cinema, the dinner table.
As I went on, her eyes started lighting up as her mind spun with the possibilities. This was an internal inspiration. Her internal experiences were starting to spur ideas for a whole series of paintings based on her inner landscape, on how she is able to see the world.
And the best part? She suddenly had an artistic commentary on her experience with depression without even trying. She didn’t set out to create Art with a “message,” at the beginning of our meal, but in doing a little delving to find what aspect of her inner Truth she could explore, we came upon an authentic and unique way of expressing her reality that has the potential to speak to many, many people who have had similar experiences.
If you want to create Art with power, with the ability to stop people in their tracks and cause them to think, start with mindfulness, with your own inner reflection. Let the voice of your own internal soundtrack come alive and create Art from your fountain of Truth.
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