The Essence of Art

What is the essence of art? What is the purpose? Why do we create art? Simply put, emotion. We write music and lyrics to express our own feelings and share them with our listeners. We create stunning paintings to communicate how it is that what we see in reality and in our mind affect us. Even if we dissect the purpose of storytelling, through written work, film, song, and other mediums, it boils down to sharing relatable, or at least discernible, emotions.

So then, how do we transfer this into our art? First we need to start off with a well-defined intention of what we want to express or convey. If we're talking about emotion, than before we can craft our intention with a piece of work, we have to understand our own various feelings and try to gain perspective on how others deal with them as well. As this largely comes with life experience, it naturally takes quite a bit of time to comprehend and appreciate emotions. Awareness and critical thinking are our allies here; as we become aware of an emotion, it can be important to acknowledge it, and subsequently question why it came about. Asking questions should lead to finding some answers, but will also lead to more questions, which should then in turn be asked. In this regard, we need to allow this to happen, albeit, in a proper time and place. On a final note, this isn't to say that someone in their teens or younger can't have valuable emotions, but rather it takes a solid amount of experience to explore and discover understanding.

Now that we have framed this core element, we can start building an avenue to our well-defined intention. One way we can do this is to create a story or setting in order to facilitate the delivery. This isn't a new idea or a hot trend. It is rather sensible and yet it can be very easy to overlook. Although many people may think they are not creative enough to do this, we can use critical thinking and questioning as a tool to overcome quite a bit! Exercising and improving creativity is important here as essentially we are trying to use our minds to build the world of our art.

If you are trying to express feelings of heartbreak, what type of story are you going to tell? Are there two characters in your story or is it from the perspective of one person? If it is just one person, where are they? What are they doing and what is happening around them? Are they scrolling through old text messages in silence? What do those text messages say? Is there anything

distracting them from processing the situation? If there were distractions, would they matter?

Let's look at another scenario. If you are painting an image full of mystery and wonder, what type of setting are you illustrating? Is it a walk through a snowy forest full of mystical creatures watching unnoticed? How much snow is on the ground? How far into the forest is the character taking the walk? What types of creatures are there and what are their personalities? What sounds do they make? Ultimately, we need to use our artistic voice to express what we are feeling, and quite naturally, creating a story and setting are one way we can do that. By starting with a general concept and continuously asking ourselves questions about what we envision, we can dig deeper to find something quite detailed. Again, thinking deeply is our ally.

Why is this important? Why am I writing this? There are many artists who are doing this with their work. Whether they are musicians, producers, painters, filmmakers, writers, or video game designers, (not an exhaustive list) they are committing their time and effort to create something artistic. They are creating something larger than what is produced through their medium of choice. They are creating something more than a collection of brush strokes, scenes, musical notes, or words on paper. They are creating art. And the output of their efforts deserve to be seen as art.

Unfortunately, its not always easy to see the art behind the means of expression. We don't always receive personal insight illuminating the context behind each piece. As the consumers, we need to do a bit of analysis, interpretation, and questioning for ourselves. Naturally, in music for example, its absolutely fine to appreciate a song and think "This is a banger!". There are plenty of songs that are a bit more straightforward; not as deep. That's okay... but what if there was more to it? What if we were able to appreciate the song more by understanding it on a deeper level?

As a musician/producer myself, it feels amazing when I write a song that I know sounds great. But from my own personal experience, the feeling of artistic and creative fulfillment elevates me exponentially higher. It gives a sense of significance and value to what I have done that far supersedes "simply writing songs". That's not to say writing songs is not something to be proud of; it takes a lot of time, effort, dedication to the craft, trial and error, confusion, and struggling to keep faith that I can become better, just to come out okay sometimes. Nevertheless, after going through all of that AND putting my own personal expression of emotion and creativity into a project... there is no better feeling. I want every artist to feel that.