When I grew up, I had no friends or family pursuing art, because we are TamBrahms. No one in my community did that. I didn't know what art was. I didn't know that music or movies or literature was art.
I was definitely enamoured by these things but did not know it was art. Today, after reading tons of articles by Maria Popova, I kinda know what art is. I have understood in my own special way what art is, and what an artists does. She has collected tons of definitions from artists here http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/06/22/what-is-art/ and each definition is as unique as the artist themselves. It reminds me of my visit to Bistro Claytopia. They display hundreds of glazed articles painted by different people. You cannot hold one and say its superior to another. All are beautiful in a different sense. Each one depicts the artist just like each one of us is a unique feature of god. Each of us is divinity. We may not be externally beautiful but we all have aspects that are unique to us.. that are beautiful in unconventional ways...it's wrong to perceive one as above another or one profession as better or nobler than another.
All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.
To me, an artist or a creative person is someone who experiences so much joy in his/her work - someone who is attuned to divinity, who is passionate, who is insane in his love for art, who goes sleepless, who goes hungry - all to express his art.
Today, unknown to us, art is creeping into our lives in many secret ways.. through secret doors...as secretly as this guy, who's there in every pic.
http://www.viralnova.com/this-mans-ability-to-blend-in-will-blow-your-mind-and-maybe-scare-you-a-little/
Through social media, people promote art! We promote pictures and photographs.. we promote bird watching.. we tell stories.. we share links to art.. we share food photographs...we share recipes....
To me, most of what we're doing this way, is art!
Digressing a bit here:
Does anyone promote their code here? (Some people promote and market themselves, which is a different thing) Do you write about your thesis hereon twitter or FB? Do you think it so beautiful enough to share? Or you think it is beautiful but it will bore other people?
(Sure, I have seen some code which is real art. Some algorithms which are just beautiful. I have felt poetic seeing it and have been filled with gratitude for the coder).
But, the way we are made to follow deadlines and other unproductive tasks, we are unable to express our love for these things...
Most artists have the luxury of enjoying the process of making their work (Except bookwriters or film makers probably). That time...luxury of time, by itself helps one enjoy things more. If you're always working for deadlines, your work will be more dead, than alive...we need alivelines so that on the other side of the line, we are alive.. not dead..
Original meaning of deadline: line drawn within or around a prison that a prisoner passes at the risk of being shot.
People wanted you to cross it so that they could shoot you. This word could have only be coined by a sadistic person, not by a happy person. Why would I want you dead?
Deadlines mostly cause "dead" work and "dead" workers.
How about alive-line?or alive circle? A circle in which you are alive and thriving.. and outside which also you're not just alive but ecstatic!
I personally have wanted to touch, feel and enjoy my work...and have never had that luxury for long. As long as I was in the rat race, I did not understand this basic instinct. I thought I was a mismatch and slow worker, hence I was always feeling inferior.
Whereas this was a part of me being suppressed, in order to survive...to fit in..Now, I know that I'm woven from a different thread. I like relaxed work..and today's pace of work, can hardly be called relaxed...We pass through lives like bullet trains. We have no idea whether we're passing through tunnels or rocks or buildings or mountains.. then, we spend 5 lacs on a 5 day Swiss holiday to see the mountains, whereas every day we were passing by mountains :-) We don't need expensive food or travel or clothes to keep us joyful. Most businesses want us to believe the opposite though. But, the truth is happiness is there around, not in the wades of cash we carry or in the diamond studded phones we use.
Quoting J.Krishnamurti here:
http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-text.php?tid=48&chid=56794&w=&
If your eyes are blinded with your worries, you cannot see the beauty of the sunset. Most of us have lost touch with nature. Civilization is tending more and more towards large cities; we are becoming more and more an urban people, living in crowded apartments and having very little space even to look at the sky of an evening and morning, and therefore we are losing touch with a great deal of beauty. I don't know if you have noticed how few of us look at a sunrise or a sunset or the moonlight or the reflection of light on water.
Having lost touch with nature we naturally tend to develop intellectual capacities. We read a great many books, go to a great many museums and concerts, watch television and have many other entertainments. We quote endlessly from other people's ideas and think and talk a great deal about art. Why is it that we depend so much upon art? Is it a form of escape, of stimulation? If you are directly in contact with nature; if you watch the movement of a bird on the wing, see the beauty of every movement of the sky, watch the shadows on the hills or the beauty on the face of another, do you think you will want to go to any museum to look at any picture? Perhaps it is because you do not know how to look at all the things about you that you resort to some form of drug to stimulate you to see better.
So, back to art:
Children's books, sand art, watercolors, photography, architecture, travel, food, literature, the tattoos, the rangolis - everywhere there is art.. Where there is art, there is joy. There is the feminine..(the last one is my bit)
As someone rightly said - We live for art, everything else.. is just to pay the bills.
We remember art and artists beyond their mortality. We don't remember our bosses, or we'd rather not remember them even while they're alive. That's the power of art.
“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
- A Man without a country
http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=4985
http://www.viralnova.com/beach-art/
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/09/10/nurse-lugtons-curtain-virginia-woolf-julie-vivas/
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/29/henry-hikes-to-fitchburg-d-b-johnson/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/parisbreakfast/sets/72057594114774269/
http://www.whatsforlunchhoney.net/2010/03/rosewater-and-raspberry-macarons.html
http://www.whatsforlunchhoney.net/2013/07/Venice.html
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=647000608664265&set=a.647000595330933.1073741825.100000629964344&type=3&theater
http://www.buzzfeed.com/tjb2/44-amazing-places-you-wish-you-could-nap-right-now-7kc6
I was definitely enamoured by these things but did not know it was art. Today, after reading tons of articles by Maria Popova, I kinda know what art is. I have understood in my own special way what art is, and what an artists does. She has collected tons of definitions from artists here http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/06/22/what-is-art/ and each definition is as unique as the artist themselves. It reminds me of my visit to Bistro Claytopia. They display hundreds of glazed articles painted by different people. You cannot hold one and say its superior to another. All are beautiful in a different sense. Each one depicts the artist just like each one of us is a unique feature of god. Each of us is divinity. We may not be externally beautiful but we all have aspects that are unique to us.. that are beautiful in unconventional ways...it's wrong to perceive one as above another or one profession as better or nobler than another.
All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.
To me, an artist or a creative person is someone who experiences so much joy in his/her work - someone who is attuned to divinity, who is passionate, who is insane in his love for art, who goes sleepless, who goes hungry - all to express his art.
Today, unknown to us, art is creeping into our lives in many secret ways.. through secret doors...as secretly as this guy, who's there in every pic.
http://www.viralnova.com/this-mans-ability-to-blend-in-will-blow-your-mind-and-maybe-scare-you-a-little/
Through social media, people promote art! We promote pictures and photographs.. we promote bird watching.. we tell stories.. we share links to art.. we share food photographs...we share recipes....
To me, most of what we're doing this way, is art!
Digressing a bit here:
Does anyone promote their code here? (Some people promote and market themselves, which is a different thing) Do you write about your thesis hereon twitter or FB? Do you think it so beautiful enough to share? Or you think it is beautiful but it will bore other people?
(Sure, I have seen some code which is real art. Some algorithms which are just beautiful. I have felt poetic seeing it and have been filled with gratitude for the coder).
But, the way we are made to follow deadlines and other unproductive tasks, we are unable to express our love for these things...
Most artists have the luxury of enjoying the process of making their work (Except bookwriters or film makers probably). That time...luxury of time, by itself helps one enjoy things more. If you're always working for deadlines, your work will be more dead, than alive...we need alivelines so that on the other side of the line, we are alive.. not dead..
Original meaning of deadline: line drawn within or around a prison that a prisoner passes at the risk of being shot.
People wanted you to cross it so that they could shoot you. This word could have only be coined by a sadistic person, not by a happy person. Why would I want you dead?
Deadlines mostly cause "dead" work and "dead" workers.
How about alive-line?or alive circle? A circle in which you are alive and thriving.. and outside which also you're not just alive but ecstatic!
I personally have wanted to touch, feel and enjoy my work...and have never had that luxury for long. As long as I was in the rat race, I did not understand this basic instinct. I thought I was a mismatch and slow worker, hence I was always feeling inferior.
Whereas this was a part of me being suppressed, in order to survive...to fit in..Now, I know that I'm woven from a different thread. I like relaxed work..and today's pace of work, can hardly be called relaxed...We pass through lives like bullet trains. We have no idea whether we're passing through tunnels or rocks or buildings or mountains.. then, we spend 5 lacs on a 5 day Swiss holiday to see the mountains, whereas every day we were passing by mountains :-) We don't need expensive food or travel or clothes to keep us joyful. Most businesses want us to believe the opposite though. But, the truth is happiness is there around, not in the wades of cash we carry or in the diamond studded phones we use.
Quoting J.Krishnamurti here:
http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-text.php?tid=48&chid=56794&w=&
If your eyes are blinded with your worries, you cannot see the beauty of the sunset. Most of us have lost touch with nature. Civilization is tending more and more towards large cities; we are becoming more and more an urban people, living in crowded apartments and having very little space even to look at the sky of an evening and morning, and therefore we are losing touch with a great deal of beauty. I don't know if you have noticed how few of us look at a sunrise or a sunset or the moonlight or the reflection of light on water.
Having lost touch with nature we naturally tend to develop intellectual capacities. We read a great many books, go to a great many museums and concerts, watch television and have many other entertainments. We quote endlessly from other people's ideas and think and talk a great deal about art. Why is it that we depend so much upon art? Is it a form of escape, of stimulation? If you are directly in contact with nature; if you watch the movement of a bird on the wing, see the beauty of every movement of the sky, watch the shadows on the hills or the beauty on the face of another, do you think you will want to go to any museum to look at any picture? Perhaps it is because you do not know how to look at all the things about you that you resort to some form of drug to stimulate you to see better.
So, back to art:
Children's books, sand art, watercolors, photography, architecture, travel, food, literature, the tattoos, the rangolis - everywhere there is art.. Where there is art, there is joy. There is the feminine..(the last one is my bit)
As someone rightly said - We live for art, everything else.. is just to pay the bills.
We remember art and artists beyond their mortality. We don't remember our bosses, or we'd rather not remember them even while they're alive. That's the power of art.
And Joy is Everywhere;
It is in the Earth’s green covering of grass;
In the blue serenity of the Sky;
In the reckless exuberance of Spring;
In the severe abstinence of gray Winter;
In the Living flesh that animates our bodily frame;
In the perfect poise of the Human figure, noble and upright;
In Living;
In the exercise of all our powers;
In the acquisition of Knowledge;
in fighting evils…
Joy is there Everywhere.
- Rabindranath Tagore, 1861-1941
Nobel Prize in Literature, 1913
It is in the Earth’s green covering of grass;
In the blue serenity of the Sky;
In the reckless exuberance of Spring;
In the severe abstinence of gray Winter;
In the Living flesh that animates our bodily frame;
In the perfect poise of the Human figure, noble and upright;
In Living;
In the exercise of all our powers;
In the acquisition of Knowledge;
in fighting evils…
Joy is there Everywhere.
- Rabindranath Tagore, 1861-1941
Nobel Prize in Literature, 1913
“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
- A Man without a country
http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=4985
http://www.viralnova.com/beach-art/
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/09/10/nurse-lugtons-curtain-virginia-woolf-julie-vivas/
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/29/henry-hikes-to-fitchburg-d-b-johnson/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/parisbreakfast/sets/72057594114774269/
http://www.whatsforlunchhoney.net/2010/03/rosewater-and-raspberry-macarons.html
http://www.whatsforlunchhoney.net/2013/07/Venice.html
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=647000608664265&set=a.647000595330933.1073741825.100000629964344&type=3&theater
http://www.buzzfeed.com/tjb2/44-amazing-places-you-wish-you-could-nap-right-now-7kc6
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