Finally I exhausted my plans and schemes of how I could be like somebody else, or anybody but myself. I returned home, defeated and hopeless. It was in my darkest moments that I looked back on all I had done and had a realization. Through all my years of traveling and exploring and through every moment of humiliation and triumph, I had been there the entire time. Instead of appreciating where I was, I spent my most valuable moments thinking about where I wanted to be.
After realizing this, I began to see the beauty in everything around me. The beauty was no longer something that I had to search for, tirelessly. Beauty had become something that I could find in everything. There was beauty in the homeless man, with one leg, who recited his bitter poetry by the bus station. There was beauty in the woman who spent hours in the morning doing her hair, putting on makeup, and choosing an outfit for work, only to return home that night and do the same thing the next morning. There was beauty in the impatient teenager taking orders from entitled customers in the cafe.
I put traveling on a shoestring behind me. I could no longer work the late hours or the manual labor and write the way I wanted to write or live the way I wanted to live. I finally saw that my art wasn't to be something searched for or decided upon. My art was to be the expression of what had already been decided by the world around me. That is what I hope to share and I believe I can share it with the world also while making a living for myself through journalism.
I really enjoyed reading your artist statement. What a wonderful realization that their are valuable stories and beautiful and meaningful images in your immediate surroundings! I do suspect, though, that your time traveling gives you a very interesting perspective about what you are seeing up close now.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this.
What an inspiring statement. I agree with the idea that we are constantly shaped by the experiences we go through, never something to be determined or finalized. It is good to always keep striving for more, to be better, to do better, but it is important to take in where we are at and how we have grown to get to that point.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your statement. I feel like so much of what you said resonates with me-searching for life or what you desire in life anywhere but the present. That you actively went out to find yourself and realized you've been there all along is a huge thing. In this day in age people rarely have that kind of revelation and just expect things to fall in their lap. It's good you know in what why you want to express yourself and are actively achieving that!
ReplyDeleteYES! Understanding the power of now is a gift to anyone. And "now" is often the process much more than it's the goal.
ReplyDeleteYour journey of following your inspirations, traveling, experiencing new cultures, new sights, sounds, etc. has given you a vocabulary for your art, whatever medium or style you prefer. In your searching you found yourself, and because of your travels and experiences, you have something to say. This is so important for all artists to understand and utilized. What good is learning proper English if you don't have anything to say? If we, as artists, have nothing to say with our art, then we need to go out and live life more, go look at our old and new inspirations, and start
traveling again. Yes ! The beauty is in us, and our process. Thanks James !!