Sunday, February 27, 2011

Plato's myth of the cave as artist's life

Part 2 of "The Lady of Shalott" speaks of the lady's inability to pause in her weaving to experience the world that her tapestry draws upon from the sights reflected in her mirror. When she finally stops to taste the life she sees passing her by, she loses the ability to continue her work. She loses, in fact, her life. This is certainly an apt metaphor for the life of an artist. It often seems that those who create art, whether through a visual medium like paint or sculpture (or textile), performance mediums like music or storytelling or dancing, or a writer, must be allowed their method of self-expression in order to fully exist.
Artists create works that bring humanity closer to the fullness of life. Artists make songs that celebrate the feelings that we all hold in common, that return us to some magical place or time in our lives. Artists draw the pictures and take the photographs that transport us to the most perfect parts of the earth, real or imagined. Artists write the stories and the characters that are so real we find our understanding of what it means to be human forever altered, our understanding of life enlarged. Without art, we would be less fully alive, less fully human, and less fully endowed with an ability to appreciate the subtle colors, flavors, differences and commonalities we encounter.
This need artists have to create, and our need to be exposed to, and absorb their creations, gives birth to one of the great paradoxes of life. Artists may well be born, not made, but they are hardly sprung forth fully formed from some mythical forehead. More likely, a given person may have more or less need to exercise the imagination and powers of expression than his or her peers, which leads to that person finding a mode of expression which speaks to- or through- them. The artist then spends many hours and years honing and perfecting the skill set employed in the expression of their chosen medium. After all, in the end, art is metaphor, and if the artist hasn't learned to "speak" his language with perfect facility and the largest vocabulary possible, the metaphor of his or her creative expression is going to become muddled in the transmission from creator to audience. Passion will drive a true artist forward, and the urge to make more perfect the artistic expression will compel the artist to engage ever more in the art, which leaves less and less of the parts of life not concerned with art accessible. The artist is consumed in his or her passion, and the "real" world becomes only a faint, flickering shadow play on the wall of a cave of the artist's own, accidental creation.

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