Art: A How To on the Do's and Does of Doing It; That is to say, Art

As I increase in age I reflect on my days as a teenager and young adult prattling on to my peers about art and the creation of art and self-reflection and philosophy and the occasional dirty joke. As time went on those peers had grown into contemporary artists who all have reflected to me some strange shared delusion that I managed to impress meaningful perspectives and approaches to them.

Now, I would never claim to be anything more than a madman with a computer (the modern day's sandwich board) but it is plain to see that I have had many strong opinions regarding art throughout my life that tend not to fail me in producing art that is said to be "quality" or "effective."

Given that I have this dusty blog that I never use, I figured I would this opportunity to express some of my perspectives on art in a radically condensed format. If you read this and feel enlightened or inspired, then bravo! Perhaps you can apply this in some way to your approach moving forward as an artist and I hope it benefits you greatly. If you read this and think I'm a madman, then cheers and I hope you were entertained.

I. The Universe - That is to say, Your Brain

You'll have to forgive me a moment while I wax philosophical, but it is a realm of the humanities which I come by naturally.

What does a chair look like? Without pointing to any chair in the room or biergarten you happen to be occupying, conjure a chair in your mind's eye. Your ideal chair. When you think of what a chair is, what the word means, this mental image is what your brain manufactures.

Now, do you think this is the same chair that everyone who is asked this question thinks of? I can tell you what comes to mind for me right now: a wooden chair, viewed from such an angle that you can see the top of the seat and the back of the chair extends up and to the left. There are no arms and the back is uniform in width to the width of the seat all the way up until it meets a carved, ornate top. The legs of the chair reach slightly away from the underside of the seat from which they protrude at roughly a 9 degree angle and have carved knobs in them making them bulbous in the middle with two smaller bulges close beside these. There are two horizontal supporting beams between the legs, one on each side of the chair, and a perpendicular third supporting beam between those two. The seat is rectangular but dips in the middle to properly and comfortably support the buttocks of one who might wish to sit on this seat.

Can you see it? Can you see the chair that I've just described?

No you can't, I'm afraid. You're seeing your own ideal version of a chair that is as I described- but as meticulous as I was in detailing the chair there are still gaps of information that I have left out. The language of text fails us here as all of text and speech is such an abstract way of communicating that it takes an incredible amount of trust in the reader or listener to hope that they will understand what you are saying as you mean it.

You see, every person on the planet (and even those currently away from the planet for the moment) has had a unique set of experiences by which they have learned to generalize and understand the universe they inhabit. Even the things we learn in school are learned uniquely from the way they are learned by even our classmates in the neighboring desks. Every single piece of knowledge you learn is in some way built upon foundations of all these other things you know and the end result is that your understanding is completely unique in some way.

On top of that, there is no standard of the universe by which to compare our understandings. This paragraph will be perhaps the most obtuse to attempt to decipher but I beg you to attempt it at least once: none of what we understand in the universe is manufactured by anything other than information fed to us by our sensory organs, and none of this information is anything but clues to what reality truly is. If all life were snuffed out and eyeballs didn't exist, nothing would look like anything because things only look like things by being seen. The light reflecting from an apple would not indicate that the apple is red if eyes were not intercepting the light. Instead there would simply be particles interacting with matter and energy- that we know of. The apple in this instance is doing nothing different, but still we are not there to determine that the apple is red by way of us understanding the information our eyes tell us.

So our ideas of what things are are completely manufactured within our own heads using information from our bodies that only we experience. These unique understandings build on and influence one another, creating an understanding of the universe in each of us that is perfectly unique to each of us.

So, if our individual understandings of the universe are utterly unique despite their very general similarities, does that make us completely alone?

Absolutely, yes.

II. I Don't Want to Be Alone

Stop crying, there's good news. Perhaps you've noticed that your sense organs have picked up that there are other things walking around that resemble you in some very general ways. Word on the street is that perhaps they have their own minds and unique understandings of things. It sure would be interesting to convey some of your ideas to them, wouldn't it? Perhaps you won't be so alone if you talked to them and showed them how you see things and heard how they see things.

Well, good luck with that. I described to you my ideal chair and you couldn't even get that right. Sure, while talking you can get the general gist of what another person is thinking but all you can do is compare these thoughts with your own. When they tell you about a lovely afternoon that they spent outdoors how much of that scene playing out in your head is filled in with your own ideals of what a lovely afternoon is? This isn't their lovely afternoon at all! This is your lovely afternoon now! The sky didn't look like that! You made that up! You made up that lovely afternoon sky! You have appropriated and perverted this person's lovely afternoon! How would you feel if they did the same to you?

Well, don't worry. They do. Every single time you tell them something they're filling in blanks with their own understanding and making your story into something else. It's like the telephone game, except it's not a game. It's just what is always happening. This experience you wanted to share no longer has been shared but instead has been reproduced like a shoddy Hollywood remake of a foreign film that you're positive upon watching was created by filmmakers who never even saw the original.

Indeed, every memory you have is yours and can never be shared without significant data corruption until ultimately it is destroyed when you are, lost forever to the ether of oblivion.

So, what do you do when you have something very, very personal that you want to communicate but don't want to be misunderstood? When you want every important detail to be preserved as it is transferred into the lonely mind of another?

III. Art and Synthesis of Ideas

Oh hey, I spent so much time telling how you are completely alone and can never truly relate to someone that I almost forgot this is a post about art! Funny how that happens, right?

So, you have an ideal chair picked out, right? If you don't, then think of your ideal chair now! Don't tell me what it is, we already know that describing chairs a fool's errand.

Now, this part we can do together! I want for you to draw your ideal chair! I'll do the same! We'll show eachother at the same time, ready?

Okay, go!

Okay listen I'm a little out of practice and I don't often draw chairs so I just- you can tell right? You can tell what kind of chair I'm talking about?

Nah of course you can't. But I bet that your brain is coming up with chairs right now even from that screwy doodle. Perhaps some of what I had previously described is suddenly becoming clearer to you. Yes, we were describing a visual and by providing a visual I gave you so much more information than words were capable of. Somebody once said that, "a picture is worth 1,000 words," but whoever said that is a hack whose formula comes nowhere close enough to the contrivances involved in converting an image's expressive value into the expressive value of words.

Besides, anyone who has ever played Pictionary knows that sometimes all the drawings in the world aren't even worth one word.

But! Before we get off topic, allow me to draw 5,000 chairs really quickly so that I may get good enough at drawing chairs to produce one which more closely resembles my mental image of what a chair is.

Yeah I mean it's not perfect but it's coming around. Still, it's giving you a much clearer picture now of what's going on in my head, right? As I'm getting better at this form of art, I'm getting better at putting exactly the picture I have in my head into your head.

And that is what art does: Art is a tool for synthesizing ideas in the heads of others. And this is not a narrow definition that applies only to drawings. It applies to language: these words are being typed in a way which I have manufactured to synthesize ideas in your own head. If you're following along, they might be working! Music is a way to synthesize ideas in your head. Movies, video games, photography, performances, poetry, advertisements, calendars featuring puppies, street signs, outfits, edible arrangements- in some way they're all trying to use your exposure to them to get your brain to recreate an idea intended by the artist.

But surely visual mediums are the best mediums for expressing the ideal chair, unless you were to outright create the chair yourself. So why are there all of these mediums and why is it that the more artsy a person gets the less obvious the idea they're attempting to impress on you?

IV. Art and Using Abstracts to Convey Abstracts

I keep using the word "idea." Why do I use "idea" instead of "image" or "visual?" Because "image" and "visual" in this instance are both types of ideas. Art is about conveying all sorts of ideas, not just images and visuals.

Things are about to take a turn for the pretentious and bizarre but if you've made it this far I trust you'll be able to follow me here. This is where we leave practical, easily defined ideas like "chairs" behind and start getting into the ethereal.

Now, almost everybody in the English-speaking parts of the modern world has an idea that comes to mind when you say "chair." If something, anything that functions as a chair works for what you're attempting to describe and the exact shape and material of the chair is not important to your expression of a chair, you can leave it at saying the word "chair" and produce the desired result in a reader or listener.

But life isn't all about chairs and apples and trees and dogs, are they? We don't live in a world composed entirely of what can be found in a flashcard set for toddlers. We live in a world where we feel things, like anxiety and relief. Love, happiness, sadness. Fear, anger. Hate, the dark side. Wait, what?

All of those are pretty simple emotions, right? You know what happiness is, everybody does. Right?

Right?

Let's see here... Google defines Happiness as "feeling or showing pleasure or contentment." Hmm, simple enough. Not sure if that's what I would have said, but maybe I'm just wrong about what happiness is. Merriam-Webster would say, "enjoying or characterized by well-being and contentment." That's not quite the same, but they both feature contentment! Can't say that about the Cambridge dictionary, which would say, "feeling, showing, or causing pleasure or satisfaction." There's pleasure, though! Google agrees there!

None of these are quite the same, though, are they? There's similarities, but they're not quite the same thing. Perhaps it isn't the job of a dictionary to tell us what happiness is, but rather a philosopher! Aristotle believed that happiness was achieved by a lifetime's accumulation of deeds, choices, and experiences culminating in the perfection of human nature! Wait, so does that mean none of us have ever been happy because we haven't lived our whole lives yet? And what the hell is perfect human nature? How do I know if I've made the right choices? Aristotle isn't making any sense, what a fraud! Plato was a bit simpler in that he believed happiness was sticking to your convictions. Okay, neither of these guys are talking much about well-being and pleasures and joy, but the ancient Greeks were a very different crowd. Similarly to Plato, though, Confucius seems to believe that happiness is in satisfying your duties and ethical pleasures. Many, many, many years later Voltaire would describe happiness as a state of experiencing many joyous or pleasurable things, but that's in quite a direct contradiction to the previous thinkers.

I tried looking into what modern psychology says about happiness and, well, let's just say the topic is just as controversial there as everywhere else.

Happiness is different to everybody. People have tried to define it but these definitions aren't universal and without a direct window into the consciousness of another person who are you to tell them they're wrong?

But if I were to describe happiness in an image couldn't I do so quite easily by simply drawing...

That's a smile! That's happy! Happy is a smile! Class dismissed, problem solved!

But is it?

Artist Anastasia Tversky paints with the theme of happiness, but when I look at her paintings the only smile I see is on the artist herself (and I'm only mostly sure that's not an attempt at performance art).

So which is it? Is happiness a smile, or is it wavy colors weaving through trees?

Well, it's neither. Happiness is an emotion and there is no language for truly expressing emotion.

I don't want to presume I speak for Anastasia, but I believe neither Anastasia nor myself have created art depicting happiness here. What we have done is create art which people experience and the emotion, ideally, will come with it. The art synthesizes the emotion, or at least the most abstract idea we have of it, so that we understand what happy is to the person who created the art. It's not words floating in our heads, it's a feeling. It's an understanding without a definition. 

I believe in art we're supposed to call this "evoking" a feeling, like we're conjuring it from inside of a person. That's apt, but usually when you say that you evoke something you're reminding somebody of something. I think that's a part of what's going on, but I don't think all you're doing is reminding people of a point in their own life. These things come out because they're reference points for people- moments in their memories which define these concepts to them. Our brains compare what we know to what we're experiencing to make sense of it, to place it into context, to categorize it, and to relate to it. In my own belief, the best outcome of this process is that they come away with something new, even if it's an understanding that there is a perspective that is like their own but different, which they can appreciate even if they haven't fully synthesized it for themselves.

You see, emotion is like taste. If I were to describe what an apple tastes like to you, presuming you've never eaten an apple before, what could I hope for? There's a little bit of sourness to it, a tinge of bitterness, though overall it's sweet. Well, that could also describe a tea and lemonade mix with a cube of sugar, but they aren't the same are they? Apples are very crisp, though the word "crisp" always evokes wafers to me and apples are not at all like wafers. No, you couldn't describe the taste of an apple to someone who has never had one and expect them to take a first bite of apple without an ounce of surprise. Similarly, the pain of a romantic break-up is extremely difficult to convey to somebody who has never experienced it. You can listen to break-up songs and hear the hurt in the voice of the singer and the melody of the guitar but until you have experienced it yourself you won't fully appreciate what the song is saying because you don't have memories of those emotions to evoke. You can understand the consequences that these emotions are having on the singer, and you might even catch the general mood that accompanies such emotions from the ambiance and tones set by the instruments, but it takes one hell of a song to teach you the pain of a break-up before you've eaten an apple.

Then, at that point, it's the job of the song (presuming this is the goal of the art, of course) to evoke your own experiences and relate to you on that level to talk about their own ideas about this pain which you can now understand from their own unique perspective.

Perhaps this will encourage the audience to take this expression of emotion and compare it to their own ideals that manifest within themselves when thinking of happiness and through this comparison understand our differences; and then, as if using emotional algebra, through understanding our differences perhaps we are that much closer to truly understanding one another.

However, what if your experience is so novel and unrelatable that you can't rely on pure evocation and relation to bring the person to a place where all they need to do is consider a slightly different perspective on an idea they already understand?

V. Art and Inquisitive Minds

Now, if you thought that my over-explaining how art can be used as a language for conveying ideas that spoken and written language cannot was pretentious, then you're in for a treat because this is where we get into the stuff that even I sometimes find pretentious.

Let's say you're Hieronymus Bosch. You've had to grow up Dutch, medieval, and with a first name that gets you ridiculed at every roll call. You want to express your ideas about heaven, hell, and probably a bunch of other stuff that we cannot be sure of because as far as we know you never fully explained yourself. Also just so happens that you're extremely good at painting.

So you make The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Arguably the most famous triptych ever made and possibly the world's first Where's Waldo, The Garden of Earthly Delights is so densely packed with symbolism and mysterious intrigue that people still mull over what various aspects of it mean to this day, well over half a millennium later.

There are many art interpreters out there who spend much of their time weaving extreme threads about what they perceive to be the meaning of a piece of art, and oftentimes people put them down as pretentious or obnoxious or overcompensating for their lack of ability to accept simple explanations. Surely, The Garden of Earthly delights, much like many triptychs of the era, is simply a straight-forward depiction of the Garden of Eden and the Last Judgement.

Yes, in the final judgement of mankind surely many of us will learn to fear the dreaded Earknife Beasts.

Well, the beast IS situated quite near to what appears to be a bagpipe or something. Did people call terrible noises "piercing" and "stabbing" in the early Renaissance Netherlands? Would explain the large ears having a large arrow piercing them and a knife- or is that a feather? Why would there be a feather between two ears though?

Sorry, ahem, I beg your forgiveness. The compelling and mysterious nature of Bosch's work had pulled me right back in and I once again began hoping to understand the symbolic nature. Now, Bosch's culture, upbringing, language, metaphors, metaphysical beliefs, morals, associations with imagery, and really everything else is pretty alien to me so my hopes of deciphering what he's hoping to convey are sorely quite slim.

But I wonder: is there another artist with whom I can relate on many levels who builds similarly mysterious, intriguing, highly symbolic art which people mull over and argue about day in and day out?

How about this weirdo?

David Lynch is an artist whose works were all created in the past century, he comes from The United States (which, even if you don't come from this country, there's likely a lot you understand about living here from the U.S. media we have hoisted upon the rest of the world), he is largely inspired by contemporary artists, and his personal philosophy is one that is not inaccessible in the modern age and is one which he speaks very openly about. His movies' techniques in expression have become so widely recognized that "Lynchian" is a well-known term for any piece of media that evokes ideas of mysterious dualities and difficult-to-decipher symbolism. His television show Twin Peaks is regarded as the inspiration behind a massive shift in television storytelling dynamics that persists to this day.

Also people often say they have no idea what his movies are about, or sometimes doubt that they're about anything at all. Some people think that the horrible bum pictured below from behind the diner in Mulholland Drive is simply a non sequitur scene. But aren't the events leading up to its reveal a massive clue as to what everything in Mulholland Drive is about?

Now, I don't think that it's patting myself on the back to say that I don't think Lynch's ideas that he intends to communicate to us are as cryptic as they seem. If you watch a movie and walk away having no idea what you just watched and you stop investigating there, then Lynch didn't get through to you. Is this because Lynch is a bad artist?

Well, by now I've referred to art a few times as a language. Art mediums are languages, and most of the time we're very used to art simply trying to tell us something fairly specific, using abstractions at times to tell us the specific thing where a straight-forward representation would fail to figuratively paint the entire picture.

So, if you're not just saying something at the audience with your language, what else can you use language for that might bring them to understand something that's on your mind?

You have a conversation.

We're very far now from just telling somebody about the chair you see in your head. David Lynch often doesn't operate on the basis of simple images or emotions. Lynch expresses ideas that are often unlikely to be relatable to viewers, and are more complicated than recreating simple ideas. The ideas in David Lynch's works encompass emotions, imagery, and our relations to them but build a far wider connection between them to express philosophical concepts that we might dismiss if he didn't first immerse us in a world where his ideas are true.

That back-and-forth is something you need to have with many Lynch productions to get a deeper meaning out of it. The symbolism has a dual and paradoxical purpose: it uses recognizable symbols to make aspects of an idea relatable, but it obfuscates this relation to the idea at first to build intrigue so the viewer will investigate the art and become an active listener. If the viewer is not receptive to this intrigue and wants something simpler then unfortunately I doubt Lynch's idea, as it exists in his own mind, could survive being simplified into something they're willing to digest.

Let's take Lynch's most obvious movie, Eraserhead.

Now, I'll excuse that many people get confused with the symbolism that invades many scenes in this film. However, if you tell me you have watched Eraserhead and don't know what the movie is about then you missed something. That screenshot I included tells you an awful lot of what Eraserhead is about.  However, by examining these symbols and the stylistic choices Lynch made you start to understand the emotions, the motivations, the general feeling that the character is going through. If I told you that Eraserhead is about a man struggling to cope with having become a father I would both be correct and extremely reductive to the point of being practically incorrect.

To understand what Eraserhead is about you need to experience it with an open mind and analyze not only what is happening within the movie but the emotions it makes you feel. Just having a knee-jerk reaction of, "Oh, this is gross. I don't like gross things," is robbing yourself of analyzing what that gross thing has to do with the situation. Is that knee-jerk gross-out something that you're supposed to feel? Does feeling grossed out bring you closer to understanding the intense emotions that are being conveyed?

Well, I'm not going to tell you because my understanding is that Lynch thinks the magic of his art is dissipated by stating plainly what the core ideas are because that conversation the art has with the viewer is integral to inflicting the message on them and then building the world wherein these ideas are truth within the mind of the audience. If you're really trying to understand what Lynch is doing, though, I recommend listening to him speak in some interviews and recognize how candid and straight-forward he is being. Often the most cryptic things are coming from questions or presumptions being made at him with the idea that "Lynchian" on some level means that you're trying to be manipulative or nonsensical, both of which are things he is adamant that he never wants to be with his art. He isn't trying to mislead you, he's trying to invite you into his world to see the complicated ideas he has in a context that he understands them to work.

And that's what I'm trying to tell you: these pretentious art analysts who spend lots of time mulling over the meaning of a particularly complicated piece of art only seem like they're up their own ass because you're walking in on their half of a conversation that they're having with a piece of art.

Does that mean that all of these people actually aren't pompous, pretentious people who try to make every piece of art into more of a mystery than it is? Not at all. But if it's your go-to every time to ridicule that kind of thinking then there's a large part of the world of art that's discussing ideas that you don't even have the language to comprehend, and that's more of a you problem than a them problem.

VI. Art and Expression: Proficiency and Accessibility

Okay, let's take a deep breath. Art and Inquisitive Minds was a doozy, but things will get back on track here. Art and Expression isn't quite as deep and inexpiable as what we were just discussing, but it's the big one.

Now, have you been practicing drawing your chairs? No, of course not, you've been reading me. Besides, you don't care that much about chairs, right? Is there a burning sensation in the middle of your brain that just wants to tell the world about your ideal chair? If you work at Ikea then that may be the case (and your ideal chair is objectively wrong) but more than likely there are far more complicated or powerful emotions in your life or vignettes in your brain that you wish to express.

As I have explained above, each of our heads is full of unique creativity and novel ideas, and that uniqueness is something that I think makes those ideas valuable. But all that I've been talking about really is the art itself being a tool for different levels of internal ideas becoming externalized or synthesized in other people's minds. But now that we have the language's applications understood, to what end is this important? What is it in you that's itching to get out? What do you want to tell the world that you can't with mere words? Are you concerned that maybe you cannot?

Now, I've already demonstrated that I'm not fantastic at drawing. What I create are doodles which express everything that I wish to express about an idea and I let the rest fall into the hands of the audience because I only care about so many details. Fact of the matter is I very rarely attempt to outright convey a real thing in all of its glorious minute details in my art but prefer to stick to the details I find important.

At a certain point in time I was deeply in love with a person who I perceived as having a self-destructive quality about her that made her shut-off. That sentence does so little to express how I felt about the situation, so I just had to draw it to express myself.

The piece is titled "Loving the Dead Girl." Like most of my drawings, it was made using a ballpoint pen and standard printer paper. I remember showing it to her and she loved it and told me specifically that she could read the emotion right off the page. The bed they're sitting on leaves a lot to the imagination- perhaps you didn't even realize it was a bed until I mentioned it. The clouds are only obviously clouds by their context but they look like no clouds I've ever seen. What the heck is going on with the lighting? The shading doesn't make any sense! Well, the shadow of the wall is cast in her direction because the wall she has built obscures the light, but everywhere else shading is only used to make important details pop or occasionally to give some level of dimension to objects that need that dimension to convey the objects they are.

There's a term in visual art called "negative space" that usually refers specifically to areas left intentionally white or empty. It's a tool with a whole lot of uses, the most common usually involving drawing attention away from that spot while allowing this large empty spot to exist to create a sense of scale or something. I use "negative details" to draw the viewer's eyes to what's important. If there's enough detail there for you to understand what you're looking at, then understanding what you're looking at is all that that detail is there for. If there is a curious additional detail that can be seen where elsewhere I do not indulge in such detail, then perhaps it's something important.

That's my own trick and an inherent part of my own style and not something that you need to replicate to impress me by any means. Many very adept and technically proficient artists use tricks to both create a believable and complete image but still draw the viewer to the important details, but I do not. Both approaches, I believe, are equally valid in terms of conveyance and expression.

Now, if I were to practice every day for a few years I could also become technically proficient enough to draw things which are lifelike rather than impressionist at best, doodly at most accurate. Still, when people watch me draw, I often hear "I wish I could draw."

Well, here I am: your genie in a bottle. I will now bestow on you the secret that will ensure that you, too, can become good enough at drawing that you can express your ideas in interesting ways!

Step 1: Practice drawing a lot.

Step 2: Recognize that there are things you are bad at in drawing, look up how to be good at those things, and practice those techniques.

Step 3: Practice drawing a lot.

Until you do this you will not be good at drawing and it will be your fault because I gave you the recipe and you refuse to follow it so please stop complaining about how you cannot be good at art because you can but you refuse! 

But here's the thing: you don't have to be great at art mediums to be an artist. Hell, you don't have to be good at art mediums to be a good artist. If you have just enough of the language learned to express your ideas then you have everything you need.

I have spent lots of time drawing purely expressive doodles meant to purge excess creative energy from my head during times that I can't properly utilize it in the form of my other blog, Shot in the Dark (nsfw warning). I have also gone on at length on this blog about the boon to creative expression that is Bitsy.

The fact is, if you look for them there are mediums through which you can express yourself. Some mediums are young enough that there is no pressure to be proficient because nobody has come around and exploited it for all of its potential. Maybe you can be one of the first! But as fun as these little challenges are, or trying to be impressive with your proficiency can be, if you're expressing your novel ideas or understandings or experiences you will find satisfaction in it.

And satisfaction was in at least a couple of those definitions of happiness.

VII. Art and Expression: Community

This is an aspect of art that I have always been pretty terrible at, but there's a ton of value in it.

Remember when, above, in the very first segment of this blog post I discussed how we're all alone in our minds?

Well, you can't really change that, but I have the next best thing! While you can attempt to replicate your ideas in other peoples' minds and only hope to understand, bonding with people with similar goals and discussing your interests in various mediums or art style movements is a very real way that people can share experiences and interests together. Not only that but you can teach each other ways that you have learned to communicate certain ideas more explicitly and reliably. By learning from one another you can expand your internal libraries of unique information and each have unique approaches built uniquely from the unique ideas shared within the community.

Humans are social creatures. The idea that we're alone in our heads is something that most people find frightening or depressing (as though we know any other way of being which is less depressing than that reality). We seek validation from peers and nobody wants to feel like they have no "people" that they belong to, even though many edgy people pretend that it doesn't bother them. Go ahead, try to argue with me and prove me right by showing that my validation of your loner attitude is meaningful to you, you walking fallacy!

The fact of the matter is: people go into art because they want express something, but without somebody else to express that something to they may as well be expressing nothing. Sometimes people are just trying to express things to themselves, but such masturbatory excursions usually don't end up in front of other people. Artists are often people seeking deep connections. Interacting with that can provide extremely fulfilling relationships and friendships.

And, frankly, it's very rewarding when you find a group of people who are very proficient in the kind of expression you wish to take part in and then see that they understand and are impressed with your own expression. It's a very simple fuel to encourage you to make more art, to push yourself to do more ambitious projects.

I believe this is why you see communities form around every kind of expressive medium there is. Modding communities, such as the Wolfenstein 3D modding community, the Half-Life modding community, the Doom modding community, the various ROM-hacking communities, all show a level of camaraderie that encourages experimentation with the mediums and the members often prop each other up. The Bitsy community, the Unity community, the Blender community- all wonderful places where people will jump to help you if there's a technical aspect that you need help with to create your piece of expressive art.

Yes, we might all be alone in our thoughts. But we don't have to face that alone.

VIII. Art and Expression: Demons

At the top of Art and Expression I talked a little bit about the emotions I poured into Loving The Dead Girl.

Well, sometimes simple emotions like those expressed in Loving The Dead Girl are not what I'm expressing.

Our minds are full of wonderful, unique ideas, emotions that we want to share or visuals we want to turn into reality to show our peers. Our minds can also be very scary, hostile places that we feel we have little control over.

I've lived a lot of my life with very extreme and, until I was well into my 20's, undiagnosed ADHD. I've also since learned that I suffer from an anxiety disorder. The ADHD, when not medicated, is severe enough to cause me to spontaneously lose half-hours at a time to spacing out, or experiencing my mind rushing so fast that I cannot form memories leading to short term memory loss. I've experienced audio and visual hallucinations which, while I can discern them from what is real, I cannot cast them away once they begin until they have run their course.

It was around when I was 19 that I began drawing faces for the voices. The voices were echoes, like phrases that would bounce around in my head uncontrollably. Then additional phrases would accompany them. Soon I would have so many discordant phrases taking up space in my head that I could not think straight. When I began drawing faces for them, though, they would leave my head and become part of a drawing.

I don't believe in demons in the sense of literal tricksters and malicious spirits, but sometimes I call these aspects of my mind that I needed to personify and exercise from myself "demons" because it's just descriptive enough to fit. By expressing these parts of myself without interacting with and validating them, but simply converting them into art was a hugely therapeutic thing for me. It's one of the reasons why I drew enough to get to a point that some people would consider me good at it.

I've held a couple jobs in the field of therapy for children with various maladaptive behaviors or emotional disturbances, and I always found that giving them a creative outlet to express their negative emotions -in a way that doesn't reinforce the negativity but does reinforce a benign form of expression- helps them to cope and develop more positive attitudes.

Expression is an important part of human nature, but instances like these it can also be a lifeline to hang onto while dealing with mental illness.

So why take these drawings and share them with people? Why not just put them down on paper and then crumple the paper and throw it away? Well, one reason is to expose my inner turmoil so people can understand what I struggle with. If I can take the chaos in my brain synthesize it in the brains of others then it's no longer something that I'm facing alone. It's something that allows people to understand that maybe I really am doing the best I can given what I'm dealing with.

But, it's not entirely a selfish goal either. I'm not just here making excuses for myself. How many people out there are struggling with demons in their brains and feel completely and utterly alone? If they see my art and see what I'm going through and how I'm dealing with it, maybe they won't feel like the problem is just that they're broken and alone. The feeling that others can relate to your highly personal inner turmoil changes the situation completely.

My father once told me (a likely apocryphal tale) of how he lost his faith living in a highly religious town in Oregon in the 1950's and how he was asked why he looked so sad. He told them, "God doesn't exist and I'm the only person on Earth who knows it." The woman he had said it to said, "You're not the only person who doesn't believe God exists. In fact, there's a word for it. They're called 'Philosophers.'" And that, supposedly, was what set him on the path to becoming a PhD in philosophy.  Feeling like you have a "people," even if that "people" is people suffering from the same inner turmoil as yourself, can transform an alienating situation of despair into one of optimism and hope.

IX. The Golem and the Lich

One of the reasons I draw such busy scenes filled with tons of characters, aside from my adoration of Hieronymus Bosch, is because I want to pack my drawings with so much content that a year later I can return to them and surprise myself with what I find. I want to enjoy discovering things in my own art.

But, more than that, I want my art to continue talking to people for years to come.

Long after I'm dead.

Remember near the start of this journey I told you that your idea dies when you do? Well, if your art can convey your ideas then your ideas will live as long as your art continues to captivate people, and that doesn't have to end when you do. My boy Bosch has been dead for 500 years and he's still talking to us from beyond the grave.

Show of hands: how many of you know what a Lich is? Okay, that's a fair bunch of you, but hang in there for those who didn't raise their hands. Also, I can see you through your screen.

A Lich is a fantasy concept of a magic user who places their soul into a treasured item of some sort so that they can achieve immortality. Yes, their body may become a corpse, but they live on through the unnatural means of dividing themselves.

Yes, just like Voldemort from Harry Potter.

Now, death is a certainty in every life. The great philosopher Danny Elfman has explained that we can be so happy dancing while the grim reaper cuts, cuts, cuts but he can't get us, but even as we're as clever as can be and very quick, don't forget that we've only got so many tricks; no one lives forever. However, through art the things which only exist in your mind- in your soul-can stand the test of time much longer than your body does and continue to play a role in conversations and culture for years, decades, centuries or more.

This is one of the things that draws me so intently to video games as a medium: the interaction between audience and artist in a video game is far more explicit and real. A video game can do many things that other art forms are incapable of, such as reinforcing "correct" ways of interacting with the art and punishing "incorrect" ways of interacting with it. It allows the conversation to go down tangents which support the ideas but would be a distraction if not for it being the audience's choice to take these tangents. It means that your message can be more personalized to the audience members who approach the concepts in certain ways.

Now, another show of hands: who knows what a golem is? No, not Gollum. Alright, well a golem is a mythological concept of a being made from raw materials into a vague, usually humanoid shape and then animated without a soul. In old Hebrew texts the first man Adam is described as having been a golem. Golems cannot speak, they are usually slaves, and they have no emotion. They sometimes resemble people, but they aren't people.

Depending on the lore you follow, for a golem to become human it needs a touch of divinity, or a soul. Then it can speak.

A golem is something made from raw materials to resemble something else and to serve a purpose, but when you give it a soul it is able to speak. A lich is somebody who takes an inanimate object and places their soul into it to achieve immortality. A piece of art is a combination of raw materials put together to resemble that which comes from your soul, after which it is able to speak ideas from your soul to people.

Why am I straining so hard to create this association? Am I pushing transhumanism? Do I want us to all become mud monster magicians?

It's simply to say this: your art is an extension of yourself that will very likely outlive you, after which it houses what is left of your soul. It is what is left for people to interact with. If what you leave behind is a corrupted golem that does not speak what you would want it to, then there is a piece of your own soul that is interacting with people inaccurately, misrepresenting you. It is a cautionary part of expression, but also a hopeful one. If you do well then your golem can impart any ideas that you wish to live on past you on generations after you're gone.

X. Truly Alone and Without Purpose

For the past 4 segments I've gotten pretty close to being outright mystical and evangelical about art and expression, but I hope by now you can understand when I'm being symbolic and when I'm just trying to express what art means to me. Because there's one more lesson that I'm going to leave you with and it's one of the most important bits of all:

Nobody can tell you for certain what art is all about.

You can begin your journey into art having been told what other peoples' ideal of art is. But, the fact of the matter is, art is personal and so is how you relate to it. People like David Lynch will continue being misunderstood because what art is to them is not what art is to other people. There are many great artists out there who, if asked, would insist that their art is not reflective of any internal ideal. Perhaps honesty does not factor into the feelings some people would have about art and they seek to express ideas for which they have no connection or which exist solely for the sake of creating art from it. Some people do not see their art as an extension of themselves. Some people simply set up materials to incidentally splatter a canvas and then call the resulting mess art despite an utter lack of any idea being conveyed in the final product of what may be considered the true art of the creation of the piece.

It is a very broad subject and, though my understanding of art has taken me very far in appreciating many forms of art and finding proficiency in creating my own art, it is no more correct or valid than any other ideas regarding art. I used to bemoan Roger Ebert's insistence that video games cannot be considered art, but the fact of the matter is that what he says the word "art" means and what I say the word "art" means are two very, very different things; otherwise we would be in agreement. The criteria by which he disqualifies games as art are not criteria that I would ever consider applying to the term "art."  However, he has based his life around understanding art his way and I cannot call his beliefs invalid, only that I disagree.

Art is such a personal thing, and such a difficult to describe thing without becoming very disjointed in the attempt. However, I've taken many shreds of what I understand is the idea of art and I've put that into this blog post. Hopefully, if you were intrigued enough and even interacted with it here or there, my feelings on the subject have been synthesized in your mind to react to honestly and with full understanding.

However, I'll never know from where I sit in my own skull whether you fully understand how I see art in your own skull.

All I can hope for is that you'll express some sort of validation to me.

But all that validation can do is synthesize what I hope to be the closest I can get to confirmation that you understood in my mind.

And, if that synthesis does give me that confirmation, can I be sure that I interpreted it correctly?