When I think about living like an artist I think I will have to let go of most of the incessant chatter of electronic devises that bombard my mind with repetitive, soul stealing, heart robbing negativity that pounds relentlessly away at the brain exhausting any creativity or hope for that matter. No I am not anti-electronics just less of them.
When I start to live like an artist I will hear the wind making its way down the canon through the gnarly twisted pinions. I will hear the small rosy finches chattering at the feeder. I will notice the black and yellow orioles that grace us only for a month on their way north for the summer. I will wonder how they know its time to leave my feeder and continue on to the tall pines and mountain lakes in the northern woods of Canada. To live like an artist is to wonder if you can hear the grass grow. It is to wonder if I can find the right color red rose in my palette or the perfect purple of the sunset. It’s to show the world through my creative lens what I see. It is to awaken the world to a different vision of how life is or could be. It is to awaken the hearts of men or maybe just ourselves.
To live like an artist is to throw away what I know and to feel what I don’t know. Its to pick up a brush load it with thick sky blue paint and lay it on the canvas with wanton abandonment. To live like an artist is to let the heart guide the hand. To live like an artist I will try to live each day in thoughtful meditation about Gods will for me. I will try to curb my self-criticism and doubt. If my art brings an awareness of the world or self-awareness to me then being an artist is worth the time.
I will continue as an artist to paint, to write, to photograph, with reckless abandon because it is in those soul-stirring creations that I can hear the crimson of the rose petals, the changing sky at sunset and the grass growing beneath my feet.
An artist hears these things. The artist soul has to be set free to create. If we keep our minds and hearts in “societal check” we lose our vision and hearing of unseen. They will fade away just like the edges of the earth shrouded in fog. All us were born with the instinct to create. We are the manifestation of God’s creation. When we create things the soul begins speaking to the canvas and art is born. To knit a sweater, to decorate our homes, to photograph your daughter or son or the autumn leaves, to paint a canvas, these are the manifestations of the creative person we were born to be.
We are artists finding our “brush” our palette is our self, our world.
I will choose to be an artist not because it is easy, but because it frees my heart to hear. It frees my heart to see. It frees my heart to heal.
To be an artist is to hear the sunset, to paint it any color I choose because that’s how I see it… as an artist……We often hope that the world can see through our eyes for just a moment…..
Old building on The Highway of Legends (12) that runs between La Veta, Colorado and Trinidad, Colorado. Gorgeous scenery and several old adobe churches.
Spirit of Home 