Early July Rambles

I sit and I think, and while I’m sitting and thinking, pondering all the things that aren’t work related, I wonder what it is that makes good art great art.

Is it the techniques? The ability to uses techniques technically well. The skill and ability of caressing, shaping and manipulating a selected medium. Does accuracy accompany greatness, do they hold hands or dance together? Would studying endlessly from the old master’s transport someoneinto greatness?

Or is it the story that’s told beyond the art, behind the canvas, behind the bronze, behind the plaster? The concept. An original concept, the ability to change one’s perspectives, reinvent the wheel, conceptualises what hasn’t before been conceptualised capturing that in a vessel; does that make one art better than another? If I could think of ideas better than artists before me, does that make me greater than them?Somehow, I don’t know if it would.

Do the colours and shapes an artist uses transport them into greatness? Is there a colour palette that is the key to greatness? If there is maybe I would want to know what it is, or maybe I would just hope the secret colour palette,hypnotising the audience, would be the colours I’m already drawn to. And if it wasn’t, maybe I’d take the stance tohonour pride on individuality.

Or maybe it’s a spark, a connection. Between the art and the audience. Sometimes you see the connection. If you observe the observer observing. It could be a shimmer in the eye. Or a twist of the mouth. Sometimes I feel like you see it radiating out of them. When their souls alight. Their eyes widen in awe, ears mute the ache of the world, jaw beginning to drop. Their mind body and soul connect to the art. It’s as though as they’re connecting with the art, the art is connecting to them right back. They’re being seen in a way maybe they’ve never been seen before. Maybe that’s what all art is about truly.

I think a lot of is it your art must be your truth, it’s YOUR art, and great art can’t exactly be fake art. You can’t exactly connect to something masking what it should be.

Greatness is subjective, of course. But it takes many things to create a connection, but as I’m thinking more and more, I doubt there’s a secret formular. But I know I want my art to create a connection. I would like people to look at is and feel seen back. I would like them to be transported and recognised. Heard, listened to in fact, maybe for the first time. I would like them to feel as though they’re being reunited with an old friend once again.

Capturing this, that’s tricky. I hope each time in your life you come across my art you feel uplifted in some way, maybe even feel that comfort of an old friend. Maybe you’ll feel nostalgic yet hopeful. And maybe then, when I observe you observing while being observed right back by the art, maybe then I can say I make great art.