Why Make Art? By Leada Wood, Texas Artist

        

I have been busy sketching in my sketchbook these days because I am enrolled in Sketchbook Skool, along with 4500 other artists around the world! It is amazing! We have master artists instructing us and encouraging us along the way. Technology is amazing when used for good purposes.

Danny Gregory is one of the instructors and he has raised lots of questions and given some very profound answers.  One that really got my attention was with all the technology was, why make art? If you can copy and past images and compress them on a computer and make art, why pick up pen or brush and create? 

Here is what Danny said:

"So if, in one split second and with no real experience or skill, you can use the phone in your pocket to make an image that is technically superior and precise to anything you can make with pencil, why make art at all anymore?

That’s a question people have been asking themselves for almost two centuries. And the answer that Manet and Monet and Seurat and Cezanne and Van Gogh and the rest of the gang came up with over a hundred years ago is that the purpose of art is no longer to reproduce physical reality, it’s to convey how we feel about it. To capture the human condition, the way we see the world through the veils of subjectivity, experience, emotion, history and all the rest of the stuff that make us who we are.

This is something we have to think about when we draw.  Stop assessing your work based on how close it is to “reality”. Don’t bother posting a snapshot of your dog next to the drawing you did of it. Who cares if you are almost as good as that camera in your pocket. ‘Cause in fact, you’re not even close. That photo is a far better way to make that image. More efficient, more accurate.

But that image isn’t really what you want, is it? What you want is to capture your soul, your inner state, the love you feel for that dog. You want to make a picture of the inside of your mind.

Don’t worry about Xerox®ing reality with your sketchbook. Focus on capturing You instead.

So far nobody, in Silicon Valley or elsewhere, has come up with an app for that."

                                                                                                                      -Danny Gregory

I think he pretty much sums it up don't you?  I know I create because I have to...it's who I am...it completes me.   Leada Wood