There is little to no difficulty in saying what an artist is or what isn't the making of an artist. Then again, the question should be rephrased as 'who is an artist?'
Johannes Vermeer was born and raised in Delft, working with his own original
set of paints and with the most crucial element called time. For the artist... time in plenty and an abundance of ideas are the necessary basics of creativity [138:3]. Through the entire course of his career, he was driven purely by soul. The house help praised him on his patience and ambition for the perfect effects of a well-thought-about stroke. His wife on the other hand, with another child on the way, had thought of his tact quite differently. ...if you can't sell your work regularly and quickly, you can either starve or do something else [138:3]. For Vermeer, his priority was not just the craft, but the craft in the making.
His perspective of the living he makes out of painting is but a reward for his duty to the canvas. It is more on money follows from passion, and not passion follows from money. He is a lesson to the lot of us. When was there ever a time that we were paid for doing something we really loved?
One of the things I love about Vermeer is his many "colours". Indian yellow of
bile. Lead white from the cupboard. Ruby shellac, gum arabic and wine skin -- drizzled with oil and ground to a smooth paste for his classic shade of verdigris. Linseed oil and bone black (a sudden fascination for coal). Invention is the shaping spirit that re-forms fragments into new wholes, so that even what has been familiar can be seen fresh... [146:1]. And his search for more colors did not stop. My respect for him came through his many processes. Just the way he prepares his palettes already have much to say about him.
To understand what art is, the artist must commune with it. Ours is a world where convenience is king. What we need is up for grabs at the local store. Most of them have now become synthetic, and so along with our preferences. A certain art has died after. Vermeer's paint is already art: it is an abstraction of nature. He paints the whole that it is, the whole that is lost to us as we pass it, eat it, chop it down. It is through the painter, writer, composer, who lives more intensely than the rest of us, that we can rediscover the intensity of the physical world [151:1]. What we easily dismiss as the 'objects of the ordinary' he takes, as he sees the essence and the potential of what they are. What makes them special to his eye is their proneness of being stripped down by our thoughts and opinions for dismissal. He takes them, and through his pieces unveils to the public these objects in their true character. Whatever we missed out on through the times we thought of them as 'just basic'.
And if it is a question of knowing how to live, it would be in being an artist. There is a difference in 'seeing' and to actually see. And it is not enough to just 'know', but to strive to 'understand'. Artists seek to view a perspective in all 360 of its degrees, when we on the other hand barely even have the patience to see things 180.
Reference: Winterson, Jeanette, Imagination and Reality.
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