I took a break from creating. I didn’t plan on it being this long, I just planned on taking a little break over the film festival days. That break has expanded into the two weeks that followed the festival now. I feel bad about it. This week I’ve had training every single day, and on Tuesday, during a course, I just started doodling; the pencil gliding mindlessly across the paper, lines joining together forming complex patterns as the mind listened and learned. It was during this doodling that I was struck with a strong desire—no! struck by a strong need to create again. My mind began to focus more on that need, and I quickly marked down a list of goals:
1. Blog post will be written for tomorrow
2. Vlog will be filmed for Thursday (oops)
3. Contact will be made for articles by Saturday
4. Will be back on track by the weekend
Well, I’m a little behind. This was supposed to be posted/written yesterday, and a vlog was supposed to have been up this morning. That said, as I am writing this, I am feeling remarkably better about things. Not that I was feeling down per se, I just had this hole from the lack of creation. And this is slowly but surely filling that horrid hole!
It is remarkable how important the act of creation becomes in an artist’s life. Through our work, our creations, our beloved, we are able to become closer to the world. Closer to nature. Closer to the literal and metaphorical universe! As we create, we create in ourselves an understanding that we lacked before. Through our art we become better.
A lot of artists can seem pretentious. They can seem fake. They can look like they think themselves to better men than those who do not. Those people are not true artists. They are not creating for the sake of art! They are simply creating for themselves. They create out of the vain purpose of becoming famous and known. They do not create because it is what they live to do. These fake artists and creators sully the works of those who are true! They mire the very name ARTIST in the muck of their own volition.
A true artist, what I aspire to be, creates out of a desire and a need to create. They are the ones toiling away in their small apartments, unceasingly splashing paint upon new canvases! They are the ones pounding at keyboards in the dim light, late at night. They are the ones whose pencils are constantly scratching away. They are the ones who stop and look and marvel at the skies above them. The ones that can spend hours just studying the people around them, wondering at the sights and sounds of a place they’ve been a million times before. A true artist creates because it is what they were born to do.
I want to be a true artist. I hope that I am a true artist. I know that I miss the act of creation. I know that I mourn its absence from my life. Yet I continuously place other things, other pursuits in front of it. Always I tell myself, one day, always I say, tomorrow. Never do I say, it is the day, never do I say, today.
Maybe today is the day that it changes. Maybe today is the day I bring myself to put my art first. Maybe today is the day I become a true artist.
