Why Do We Create Art ?

The artist may have written the song or made it their own at the time of engagement or performance. The art, the artist and the audience recreate it within themselves. Art is a connection between two souls. Without the connection, it is a tree in the forest, a thing of beauty, but not art until someone really looks at it. Art is a zone not just an object.

Some stories are told purely to share something or to entertain, some are told to teach a moral, some encapsulate history and some are looking at the future. Some are pure catharsis on the part of the artist, which not only releases their own feelings but also allows us, as an audience, to get in contact with and release our own deep emotions. Sometimes they capture a brief moment of time while other art works seem to hold, quite magically, like Dr Who's tardis, a whole lifetime or era within them.

So whether you take up art as a creator or share it as part of an audience, each takes talent to connect through art with another human being. Art will speak to anyone who listens, it has no prejudices. It keeps no secrets. It has no boundaries. The song never ends because it lives within us. Art survives.

Because human beings are also perfectionists, compulsively creative and attentive to detail, stubborn and individual, with great passions and hungers. Because art is our way of releasing and sharing what is inside of us so that we may connect with other human beings. Because art is a need that must be met, that during creation sweeps us into a fast flowing river and doesn't spit us back until that need is met. And after that catharsis, then we are subtly changed and then we move on for there will be new projects, new lives, new creations.

Art is that part of us that connects with the ultimate creator and in some small way attempts to emulate the exquisite creation of a tiny newborn baby, a huge and ancient Fig tree, and the powerful and infinitely changing passion of Niagara Falls. It informs, entertains and educates and it gives us naked eyes to see each colour as if it were new and being seen for the first time.

And for those of us who are a talented audience rather than a talented creator, art can be the ride of our lives. It speaks for us when perhaps we have no words of our own. It lances a painful grief so that tears may flow. It evokes a longing in us for a lost eden and it tickles our fancy and motivates us to act on our desires. It presents us with different perspectives so that we may laugh when before we had no sense of humour, or so that we may take seriously something that we thought was a joke.