Define Art

Define Art with 3 Pictures

Nick Stone

art/ärt/Noun

1. The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

                It’s a common misconception that art is something you have to draw, write, or paint, as if it’s bound by tradition. This isn’t true. Not at the least. Above you’ll see that by the English definition, if you made it, and it was born from a deep emotion or idea, it is art. You could even define art as the expression of emotion and/or feeling. This doesn’t mean it has to be beautiful to everyone, someone, or even yourself. A piece of art can be a hideous monster, as long as it crawled out of your mind and plopped down on a medium, you can take it to the art festival.

                Now I myself like to keep my studies of art restricted to things of beauty and inspiration. It gives me a bit more of a challenge that way. It’s inevitable that I’ll find pain, anguish, and angst. It’s as easy as walking out my front door in fact. I see that in the faces of the people I love on the streets. The clouds describe it with they’re effort to keep my skin from the sweet kisses of my long lost friend, the sun. It’s interesting how people will wonder why they can’t seem to escape from hurt and demise when they embrace that same thing, only giving it food to grow.

 I enjoy the thought how fast people are to denying the beauty and truth of something. For example, you will see above that there is an over developed photo of a carefully sculpted terrain, and if you passed this photo around, and described the beauty of this simple photo, a number of people would contort their face in disgust saying that the picture is poorly developed.

                In their eyes, yes, yes it is poorly developed. But to me, the one who it was made for, the beholder sees it differently. I see this same picture to be a nostalgic memory of my past. The deep red seeping into orange then yellow then transitioning to white digs deep into my heavily locked memory box and lifts out a time when I was free to roam and explore every inch of this present called earth God made for me. A time when I was fast to debate truth, righteousness, reality, and absolutes. It all just was. The simplicity of the land was a mirror of the space I had in my imagination.

 Subject number two has come to hold my fascination for the last year. This is a Nexus One, a product made by a major corporation to portray the extent of all their creativity and simplicity that can all that your finger tips can grasp. Looking at this marvelous slab of power, I see elegance, peace, solution, completion, and inspiration. The two tone color sported by the body of the phone tells me that it’s made to impress but not to boast. The aluminum structure assures me that it won’t fail me when my grasp fails it. The glass platform facing me say joyfully “I clean up quite nicely don’t I?” Is this art? My senses are suggesting yes.

To bring home the point is a saying deployed out of the mouth of one who’s inspired. The medium here is word portrayed on a canvas. Simple, yet powerful. A fitting summary of my essay.