When someone says art, you probably think of painting or drawing. Likely you included books, poetry, too. Maybe you include the performing arts; acting on stage (or in front of a camera), dancing, music. Maybe you even think things like sculpture, architecture and photography are art forms (oh aren’t you cultured?). I would say that far beyond just this list of artsy things, art is something we have in each of us. It’s sort of how movies talk about love. “It’s more than a feeling, but you just know when you’ve found it.”
Maybe you’re not what most people would consider a artsy person. Maybe when you hear about those sorts of things it just bores you to death. A lot of people feel they aren’t creative just because they can’t paint or write a song, no matter how hard they tried. My whole childhood up until I got into writing, I felt that way. I thought I was more of the type to calculate totals for a budget proposal or tell you the population of a small country in East-Central Africa than to do this. Nothing is wrong with either of those things, as a matter of fact they are both good things, and I would still enjoy looking into demographics in Eritrea, for instance. But I found something that I loved to do, no matter how good or bad the results were. Even if I stayed up until 2a.m. on a cold winter night working on a piece, and woke up to find it was trash, I was happy when I was creating it, and I learned more about my art.
But, like I said earlier, most people probably don’t get all that much out of traditional art, just like even if I enjoy someone else’s painting, it would only cause me suffering to try to paint my own masterpiece. It would hurt my pride and your eyes. It would put the pain in painting. I would apologize for that joke, but to be completely honest, I’m not sorry. My point is, I didn’t get any satisfaction, any feeling of creativity or craftsmanship from art classes, and if you don’t get it from any of “the arts” , maybe you get it from working on old cars, making furniture, or practicing your slapshots all year in preparation for the winter. Rather than being a poet, you could find your outlet in being the mom who always brings really delicious dessert to everything, or the dad who is always willing to drive all the kids for their Scouts trip. Maybe you are just really good at making people feel welcome. Or, it could be that when you see a sheet of numbers, it is like when a trained pianist sees a page of sheet music and hits all of the right keys at all the right times creating, if only for you, a beautiful symphony.
The world is full of so many different people, different in all sorts of ways: extroverted/introverted, emotional/rational people, some confront problems head on, while others would be more likely to put off conflict as long as they can. Some people need to plan out their lives and others need to be free to improvise. We’re all different and need different ways of expressing ourselves, even if its not expressing emotions or thoughts. Like probably half of all bloggers, I got INFP on a Meyer-Briggs test, so this type of thing comes mostly naturally to me, whereas I’m sure that I am terrible at many things most people feel confident doing.
While I would recommend trying the traditional arts just to see if you enjoy them, the purpose of art is to celebrate human existence. Wherever you get the feeling of purpose is where you are an artist. Art tends to be where you go when you need a refuge, where you can take anything the world has thrown at you and put it into something purposeful. You might think it has no use or purpose, but the world has something, some feeling, some device, some idea, some company it didn’t have in it before. God gave you a gift, you can sharpen that gift into a skill, then you can make the world a better place just by doing something with passion and joy. If you feel whole and are working your hardest on it, you are more of an artist than any beret-wearing hipster wannabe sitting in a Parisian café.