Finding Your Voice

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

Miles Davis

“This is terrible. This is garbage. Why am I doing this?” If you are any type of creative person you will have heard these doubts in your mind, you will have been convinced to stop countless times, discouraged and disheartened.

Nevertheless. Push on. Create, and keep on creating, unafraid of so-called failure. Create because the voice within you is uniquely yours. Create because it is the imperative of spiritual beings.

Carefully listed in a book are the names of artists, the titles of their pictures. People carry these books in their hands as they go from one canvas to another and turn over the pages and read the names. Then, they go away neither richer nor poorer in spirit than when they entered; and are at once, again engulfed by their personal interests, which have nothing whatsoever to do with art. Why did they come? Each painting mysteriously contains an entire life, a life of many sufferings, hours of doubts, of enthusiasm and of delighted inspiration. Whither does this life go? Whereto directs the artist’s soul its active creativeness? What is its message? “To send light into the depth of human hearts Is the artist’s vocation,” said Schumann. “An artist is a man who can draw and paint anything,” said Tolstoi. Of these two definitions of artist’s activity we must choose the second, if we think of the exhibition just described. With more or less skill, virtuosity and vigor, objects are re-created on a canvas, painted either roughly or smoothly. To harmonize the whole onto the canvas is the road which leads to art. With cold eyes and indifferent spirit the spectator regards this work. The connoisseurs admire “skill” (just as one would admire the prowess of a tight-rope dancer), and enjoy the “painting” (as one would enjoy a pastry). Hungry souls leave as hungry as they came.

Kandinsky “On The Spiritual in Art”

Send your light.