Beyond Replication to Revelation Within
The field of art and I mean the art that is known as artistic expression, painting, poetry, all these crafts. In my view, the majority of what is called art is not art at all. It’s a replication of thinking. And if by now you did not notice, thinking and imagination are the same thing. They are different words that describe the projection of an image in the field of the mind and build-up through imagination. So it seems like different building blocks, but it’s one. It’s the movement of thoughts. The movement of thoughts, in my view, can never touch real art.
A cloud in the sky is real art. A line of a wing of a butterfly over the water is real art. The dew in the morning is real art. And why? Not because nature did it or something like that, because the beauty that they encapsulate is the thing itself. There is no reason that is followed with a plan, that is followed with performance, that is followed by some conclusion or measure. Art is the thing itself.
So if I go back and limit this very wide topic to art, which is artistic expression of human beings, real art would be the thing itself. So let’s say you hold a brush and you make a line on the paper. The very strike of that line in itself is art. But it’s only in itself if it was not brought there by an idea, by preference, by direction, by an accumulated skill and capacity to reproduce something that is considered art.
If you look at music, then real art would be the sound of the piano before it is built into a melody, just the sound of it. You can knock on the wood, listen to the echo, this is real art. And if you listen, each time it’s different. So real art is there, again in my view, to develop the capacity of this inner ear and inner eye to meet beauty in itself, in the thing itself, as the thing itself and not away from it, as we just said.
Now this talk is pointing to a question: What is the place of art, again artistic expression, in your life? You may be one of those that have some experience and here and there they touch brush, piano, canvas, words, poetry, photography, whatever it is. Or you may even be a so-called professional who does it for a living, make money from it or reputation. But most likely you’re neither and that’s the good news.
Because your entry into art is instant. Take sand in your hand, stand in a field, wait for the wind, let the sand fall and watch the way the wind take the sand and how it falls to the ground. Real art, obviously. No one can plan it. No one can claim to do it. Only in the thing itself, in the way the sand fall and in the privilege that you as the artist have to see that it’s not made by you, even though you took it in your hand and you left it, real art comes to be.
Real art is instant without continuation. It may leave a mark, surely you will not know how to explain that mark. And to so-called give you the feeling of what can it do for you, when you will question truly within yourself, you will see that both the questions that you ask and the answers you provide are invented. They are within the box. They typically do not reveal anything new, fresh. And the reason is that they are made by streams of words, which are those movements of thoughts within the boundaries of the known.
But in art, real art, one that you do not prepare, do not come to in order to create or in order to meet beauty, at the moment the real art manifests, you can see that you need not do anything for it to be the thing itself and the beauty in its perfection, not separate from it. It may sound to you even complicated or maybe irrelevant, but as always, if you try it, you may be surprised to see that the thought, “art is not for me” or “I cannot do” or “there is nothing in it for me”, blocked something too precious, too pure to pass.