My Opinion

Instructions

I feel like art has become performative, if I can say that? The “art student” stereotype who dresses in unique clothes and listens to niche music (not that it’s bad if you so but it’s still a stereotype) and drawing in one way instead of another is ‘weird’ and ‘wrong’? And things like fully rendered sketchbook pages being expected and my SKETCHES in the sketchbook mean I’m not a good/legitimate artist?? Like the poser here is the artist who says they always draw perfectly, not the other way around. I never see sketchbook dumps with scribbles and pencil dents and eraser smears anymore? Why? The artists’ sketchbook is the one place where they can draw whatever because they themselves are the intended audience. Think of it like that. The sketchbook is to sketch. And, again, if you draw nicely in your sketchbook, that’s great! I do too! But why are we painting in every single page? You sat down in a room with these supplies to do this. Isn’t a sketchbook for when you have inspiration on the go? When you see a beautiful person across the road and you know you’ll never see them again? Or when you’re sitting at a restaurant and the light hits your mother so that she looks like a painting? The art book and the canvas is for the finished art but the sketchbook is for what comes out of your soul. What comes out of the spirit of art deep inside your heart that yearns to frame everything, that can make anything look more beautiful than any other thing to ever exist, even for a moment. And with social media, every artist has to skip the random midnight scribbles and quick put-downs of the features of a beautiful stranger, instead going for the rendered hour-study finished with oils. Starting off seriously with art on scratch still seeing the art of kids helped me see that anything can be beautiful, through the right eyes. As someone once said; “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Do art as your little art spirit says to, not your algorithm or the non-artist friend who only knows of art through ASMR paintings and bob ross off of TV and their phones. Because everyone is an artist. You don’t have to dress cute or be niche for that. The way you write, the way you think, the way you arrange your life is art. Because you, a human, a person, have made it with energy. Your own energy, which came from food, which was cooked on flames made of ancient forests, food that comes from ancient species of plant and livestock refined by our ancestors for their children—us—to ingest. Art is how your soul talks to other souls. Whether with words, with actions, with pictures, with colours, but there is someone other soul that will come look at your art, see it, really see it, and understand it. Feel with it. Hear the message your soul has marked down for the next beholder of beauty.