Conduct the rhythm of the place. It’s the fourth dimension of time and place that has to be seized and held prisoner in a painting or even a photograph. It can be a landscape, or an ocean or a city.
It can be people. It is not the visual facts that are important—not just the external likenesses. You have to look for the truth behind the obvious. It hides from the image captured by a camera, or mirror. It’s a likeness not easily defined by words. There is a lyrical rhythm to nature, man, beast or tree that can be discovered in paintings or poetry or music. It reaches into an eternal rhythm. It’s that elusive quality called identity.
It can be the unexpected clarity discovered in trauma and it can be lost again in the fog of PTSD--mixed in with all the evolving and struggling life forces of the natural world and ever-changing human circus. But don’t settle for the social façade. Look through your own eyes—those interpretation tunnels nuanced by all of your dynamic second-by second personal changes, uncertainties and insecurities. Reach for the meaning of all that and you might discover identity. That’s what an artist should paint. Or a photographer photograph. It’s what we all should look for.
Identity is not always a pretty picture, but it is honest.
One of the rewards of being alive is in the unlimited ways you can search for and define character as you conduct the music of life. I have profiled over 140 artists and no two reach their own reality in the same way. Many are radically different—true to their own vision of what painting or sculpture or other manifestations of art should be for them.
Independent people are like that: using their own traumas to climb to a higher dimension through art. They conduct the rhythm of the place.
Wonderful. It’s so easy to get lost in the identity that others force on us. I spent years believing that I was the person that my abuser drilled into me. There is a way out of the PTSD - finding the self, the real meaning and true identity. Working it out through an art form is true catharsis.