Art & Conquering your Inner Fears Matthew Strehl, 1/22/23 When the water is high, the fire is raging and the floor is dropping out from underneath you as the roof caves in, your first response isn’t to sit and paint the scene. If it was, you and your art might be utterly consumed. Art is something the individual “Does” when they aren’t fleeing danger. When a human beings survival needs are met, the free time that would have normally been spent gathering or hunting now has room for all these new activities. Art is something humans can’t subtract themselves from, human activity and life IS art. Any actions that humans are observed doing in life could be amounted to complex dance or song, along to the rhythms and songs of others, dancing strange dances to the rhythm of earth, every day… without ever questioning, forever. People who are invested in a career could be described as doing a sort of choreographed “Work Musical Ballet Play” in which the observers can exchange money and gather the fruits of this sort of “play”. Often when I am doing activities in life, they have rules, guidelines or penalties that may invoke fear or Joy which seem to be a structured “play” of sorts. You have sports like soccer for example with rules, bounds and a way of playing. These are strictly structured forms of art where the players are supposed to interact in similar ways… Very similarly to a mix between a play, choreographed dance and line or contra dancing. Some people have happy dances in life, others have a sad or mixed experiences in their dance. Everyone experiences their own singing and dancing and are subject to others singing and dancing in life. Our dances and songs in life define the borders between our lives as humans in the ways our movements and sounds define our spaces. Fear can be associated with claiming new territories from the labor of your art whether hard sought or thankfully given. Artists must see past life itself into the world of the undiscovered and unknown in order to experience the world between reality and mentality. That is, to experience the particles and resistances between you and the medium as the unseen strings, tense in the currents and ripples of time. Here, in this unseen and almost unheard, unfelt space, the medium and the artist weld together in a dance to somehow coax some third element from this unseen either. It is perhaps the space between the artist and their desired medium that creates so much anxiety and fear for artists in the information age. Artists are no longer satisfied with the mediums at hand and forever seek a medium that would fit their inner informed artist better than their current. Such are the casualties of fast fashion and an ever growing want for low quality dopamine bursts found on modern art platforms such as Tik ToK and Instagram (as well as other “Byte Sized” art platforms). These art sharing platforms lead to a “medium envy” or lifestyle jealousy that keeps the individual from reaching their artistic goal. Constant striving for better mediums wastes our current medium in the present reality: “They distract you with what you want, meanwhile they enjoy the interest of what you currently have” -Matt Strehl In modern life, where artists and others alike are chained into monthly payments where time away from work is often spent filling domestic requirements, art is growing more and more scarce; and with it, goes community and culture. You have to sort of settle for your life, your art. You need change your definition for good art from corporate creations (iPhone, nice cars, watches, big label music) to those of your own (DIY, painting, mending, commissions) in order to reclaim your time, money and artist ability/identity. In the essay “Art and Fear” the author gives a good tip about balancing survival and the human need to create: “It’s all a matter of balance, and making art helps achieve that balance. For the artist, a sketchpad or a notebook is a license to explore-- It becomes entirely acceptable to stand there, for minutes on end, staring at a tree stump.” (Pg 101, Art and Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland) This quote also outlines the fact that in order to do art, you don’t need much more than a notebook, or a stick to scratch in the sand, maybe you don’t even need that. Art can happen in the flash of an eye or over a very extended period, art has no bounds. Even losing or suffering a tragedy is art to those who perceive it that way, seeing life as art can teach us invaluable lessons about ourselves and others and the eARTh we live on. IF we accept art as being synonymous with life and start to feel the dances and songs and art pieces we currently do and experience others doing then we can gain some introspection into the ways that our life and art can fit into our spatial landscape. Recognizing myself as my instrument and observing the ways that I and others move in life has been instrumental to figuring out how I can do a good dance and sing a good song.
