Art

PART 29. Art

I was exposed to art even though I didn’t know what it was. I thought medium equaled art, or skills and technique equaled to art. I was wrong. I learned that everyone has to find their own way with art, their own understanding of it. And as far as I’m understanding it, mediums are not art, and skills and techniques are not art. 

To me, you could be having the greatest skill and finest craft on earth, and it still wouldn't be art to me, if whatever you decide to create with a medium of your choice doesn’t have a little bit of yourself / your ego in it. Like what I did, it was all imitations of other people’s techniques. Nothing I drew back then was anything I wanted to draw. I couldn’t decide on my own: do I want to do it this way, or that way? This color or that color? Thin strokes or 泼墨? I had an idea. It didn’t have to be one way or another. I felt ambivalent about all of it when it came to pencil sketching, handcrafts, watercolor, calligraphy, etc. It might have had something to do with me never getting “permission” to experiment and fully enjoy those to the level that I did with writing and movies to develop my own taste / preference. It didn’t matter to me, I didn’t think I’d have anything to do with art ever, even though I did like all of my mom’s students' work. There would be some watercolor, color theory assignments, mural practices etc. I was so stunned by their precision and technique that I’d always ask my mom if I could take their turned-in assignments home, and my mom would always say yes. 

My mom’s students would always say hi to me when I visited her at her college. They would be all smiley, and I would be all moody and refuse to talk to them. Sometimes I’d sit in random classes, only to leave early because they were too long. I’d roam around the campus, which was in the middle of nowhere at some quite remote place. This was back then, I heard it’s a somewhat medium-sized city now. There would always be some construction going on, the roads would be quite muddy and hard to navigate, surrounded with all the dust from the sites. 

Every weekday, mom would always wait for a shuttle to take her to work in front of the library next to home. I started waiting for the shuttle with her on some days to go to her work to kill time after I stopped going to school my sophomore year. I’d wait for the shuttle with her in the morning, and a few of her co-workers would come and wait with us, and they’d try to talk to me, and I’d have nothing to say. They called me an alien back then, it was not nice. 

Art is not technique, even though art needs technique, or the lack of it. Everything in a piece should be intentional, should have a purpose, a reason, why it had to be that way, and not the other way around. Art is ego. Art is emotions. Art is a reaction. Art is thoughts, consciousness, pain, struggles, anxiety, fear, peace, war. 

Art is interactive, it does not exist alone. Art is a human / sentient creature experience, any creature putting anything together with the sole purpose of self-expression is art. Art is the inner child. Art is the misfits. Art is not when you choose it, but when it chooses you. Art is therapy, to both the people who do it and the people who enjoy it. Art is a product, it can be sold and bought at Sotheby’s. Art is an investment, it requires time and headspace. Art is anything anyone can do. Art is life. Life is art.

PART 30. Art is life

Art is life. Art is an outward expression of the experience of life in one shape or another. Whether it’d be confusion, frustration, sadness, anger, it’s whatever makes you want to scream, cry, read, or write. Whatever conclusions you draw from another person’s art is also part of art, your responses are part of art. After realizing what it meant to direct in 2018, I decided I did want to choose filmmaking as the craft of my choice for self-expression. Before that, I didn't even notice I had a need for self-expression. I finally realized that I liked dancing for self-expression, that I liked reading for learning / exploring, that I liked motion pictures for entertainment, but I enjoy art for therapy. 

Art was a need, not a want, for emotional stability and self-help therapy. When I see their anger, their pain, how excruciating that might have been, it does bring me relief and peace. When I see novel ways of constructing whatever concepts they might be trying to construct the piece around, I also get entertained. Renaissance paintings and pre-impressionism are extremely impressive, however it’s a language I understand but don’t speak. Modern art is more like first nature, I can use it, choosing a modern medium such as film with less than 130 years of history is quite fitting. 

Toward the end of the 19th century, people were obsessed with the spectacle of moving images. This was the genesis of motion pictures, a spectacle. In Jordan Peele’s sophomore film Nope, he discusses this phenomenon of a spectacle. People came to theaters expecting a spectacle for a while, not art, drama, or emotional catharsis. In 1894, the Lumiere brothers held the first public screening in Paris with short reels like Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat and Workers Leaving the Factory. That was generally considered the first public screening of motion pictures. I need to read more into this, but I was under the impression that the Lumiere brothers came from a very wealthy family. Since the genesis of motion pictures, it was something invented for fun, screened for fun, and people came for fun. I like fun.

It didn’t take long for motion pictures to evolve to having colors, sound, visual effects, special makeup and all that. It became a medium for narrative storytelling. I like hearing stories, and I like telling stories. It started as therapy, continued as entertainment, now grew into a profession because it has allowed me to survive in such a competitive modern world without feeling drained spiritually, only physically, emotionally, politically. But I was going to be drained in that way regardless, let me have my spirit so I can at least hold on.