Childhood Art Questions
Childhood Art Questions
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When I was a child, I remember having questions about art: the artists and their works, but it seemed like I couldn’t get answers from the adults around me. I wrote down some of those questions and tried to answer them from my current perspective. It's like an interview between my current self and (probably) 9-year-old me.
Anyway, these are the questions I had as a child about art that I wish adults had answers for:
-What's the meaning of art? Why is it made?
Art is made to be felt. It doesn’t have to look pretty or realistic.
-How can I feel it if I don’t understand it?
I think it's about sensitivity toward everything. If you look at the world and live your life that way, you will feel things—and then you will recognize those feelings in others' artworks, no matter the form or shape in which they express them.
-Why do artists want to make artworks?
Artists create works primarily because they need to, because they have to do so. Sometimes it's a matter of helping, even saving, themselves. They put themselves visibly in front of the world—to reveal themselves, even if it's painful to be seen behind the shell, how they feel, and how they see the world. And sometimes, when others see and understand them, I think it makes them a little less lonely, too.
-How can we call an artwork 'deep'? How do we identify that?
Probably it's when someone explains the unexplained, names the unnamed, and expresses the shared feelings of the human condition. It's said that great tragedy or sorrow leads an artist to such deep creations. I think, in such moments, words come naturally when writing, no matter how simple they may seem, or the vision for a painting emerges, even if the result looks plain. Such artwork opens new doors to understanding what and how a human being can feel.
-Where does the urge to create something come from?
When the life within us is so abundant, we feel the need to give it its own existence, to separate it from ours. In those moments, everything comes together, unites within us, and asks to be given form of its own.
-Why bother painting objects that we see every day, for example nature mortes?
We see things (objects) as they are, but we perceive them as we are. That's what matters when being an artist. Therefore, no object is so insignificant that it is not worth depicting, because it can be part of the visual language that the artist has chosen.
November, 2024
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