What does the artistic experience mean to you, or for you?
Leave it to you to come up with these marvelous questions, Louanne.
I'll give you my answer, but first let me comment on the previous remarks.
Maybe my misconception is that human intelligence is language based. I suspect, that before being able to think in language, I was much more harmonious and much happier person. One point for Chaos then.
An interesting point. But humans were presumably making things even before they were speaking, and in the process of making those things, they perceived that some of those things were better made than other things. That may have been the basis of craftsmanship, which in turn was the basis of art.
The image I get in my mind when someone says artist is one who is free and unburdened by norms or standards. If I truly felt like I was an artist, I wouldn't bother even trying to apply proper grammar or spelling. I would feel unobliged to make sense to whoever my reader was. I would just write the words as they form in my mind, carefree and productive. Whatever the end result would be, would be art, free from external pressures and expectations.
That's fine if you're only writing for your own amusement, with no expectation that anybody would read it. But for me, writing and storytelling imply readers and listeners. I may sing my songs in the shower, for my own amusement and to hear how the acoustics change, but the songs are really intended to communicate something to another person. To be crude about it, it's the difference between masturbation and intercourse. Not that I have anything against masturbation, but it isn't the same as doing it with another person, and reacting to their reactions, which is what intercourse really should be about.
So I started looking into what was behind abstract expressionism and cubism. Having educated myself a bit, I went back and looked at Picasso and Mariska Karasz again. Lo and behold, their work made sense. I branched out from there and found whole new worlds to consider.
That realization closely parallels my epiphany with jazz. I had no experience with it until I saw Dave Brubeck in concert. The first half of the concert had no effect on me, but I suddenly realized how they were playing with structure and tonality, and it all made sense to me.
That isn't to say all art is good art, but sometimes it really is a matter of the right education.
As Vonnegut said (or quoted), it's easy to tell good art from bad art, but first you have to look at a million paintings.
he was really big on getting younger as you grow old.
Like Robert Zimmerman, noted winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature:
"I was so much older than
I'm younger than that now."
The real catch is that a jazz musician spends his time before that presentation practicing countless hours on their instrument and learning scales so that when inspiration strikes, the music flows forth. I liked that analogy so much because sometimes we expect art to be a natural burst of inspiration from divinity.
I think that every composer goes through that process. What sprang forth from Bach's pen or Beethoven's was the product of every song they'd heard and every hour they spent practicing at the keyboard. Each piece was never heard before, but was snared in written form and transmuted into something that could be accessed ever afterward.
We perceive that the famous/successful artists were just born that way. Some are, but more are made. They struggle, they live, they experience life and that experience becomes their "scales practice." For those willing to write about it, they get better at writing, and better at telling their stories until one day inspiration strikes.
Exactly. And most successful authors will tell you that their first several thousand words were rubbish. (I know mine were.) One writer compared it to an athlete running on a track, over and over again, with not discernible effect on the world at large, until that big race where all that training and conditioning is brought to bear and the whole world is watching.
I read somewhere that it usually takes ten thousand hours of practice or performance to get really good at it. When the Beatles exploded on the music scene, seemingly overnight, what people really heard were the result of playing eight to ten hours a night, six days a week, for three years in clubs in England and Germany. It probably took that long to get to know each other, and to know the music. (Ringo was, of course, a latecomer, but he'd already served his apprenticeship with Rory Storm and other bands.)
Now for my take on the subject. Any practice approaches art when it best communicates an artist's vision or state of mind to an audience. It's that simple. If I can read something and feel enlightened or informed, the writer has done their job. If I can see a sculpture and perceive how the sculptor has conveyed a sense of dignity or motion or intimacy or whatever, I consider that a job well done. If I can hear music and think "I've got to buy that recording so I can hear it again and again" or go to that performer's concert to see how it might be transmuted into something different at a live performance, that's good music.
Of course, there's an internal aspect to it. I wrote a story about an artist who told me that when he sits down to paint, he finds that something that used to work no longer works, or something that never worked before suddenly works just fine. And he said that if the day ever comes when that surprise doesn't happen, that would be the day that he quit painting. (That's a true story, and the artist is Jerald Silva.) That's like singing in the shower, for no audience, but for the pleasure seeing what that song might sound like on that particular day, and that particular place. But Jerald may paint for pleasure, but he also paints for lots of money. (If you have a few thousand dollars to blow, he'll gladly paint your portrait.) And people consider it money well spent if the result is something they'll want to look at again and again, and see new stuff every time they do.
