More than Paint and Brush Strokes

For some artists, like Van Gogh, art is about capturing beauty where it already exists. They do that in their own unique styles. They want people to see the world from their eyes. I believe it is more important to find beauty where most won’t. My art is about the unsaid and unheard. The things our collective humanity enables us to feel, but the quiet and unassuming ones like me fail to put into words.  

Not being able to put something into words sounds strange coming from someone who does this for a living but I haven’t learnt to introduce myself as a writer yet because I will always be the person who draws before the person who writes. I had to learn how to write but I never had to learn to draw and I never really did. From an early age, I just had to pick up the pencil and everything else just came naturally. 

This makes me insecure about the fact that my art may not be good enough but then art doesn’t have to be pretty or perfect. You’re meant to experience it and feel what the artist wants you to feel. The first black artist in America who rose to fame in the whitewashed world of art didn’t paint pretty pictures to look at. He painted abstract and absurd images which said what he wanted to say about America, about art and about being black in both worlds. 

Art in the philosophical sense is more than just paint and pencil marks on a canvas or paper; it is a message. It aims to make an impression on the observer. They process the artistic expression and evaluate it. They experience it with the backdrop of their own point of view. Art is therefore not just a one-sided expression of a conception. Art is a form of communication, as it enables you to feel, but also serves as a window into the past.

There is a universal language of art, which all humans know, which takes shape and visibility through artistic and spiritual research. This language links past, present and future, by means of a feeling inherent in all men of all times in every place.

Every artist has something to say through their art. You find that in common and recurring themes in their art. Frida Kahlo’s art was all about her loss and her experiences with disability. Edward Hopper captured the alienation and loneliness of living in a large city like New York.  

Not that my art will ever be as great as these people but as I mentioned earlier my art is or I should say I want my art to be about the unsaid and the unheard, the dismissed and disregarded injustices happening to women, the unseen and unappreciated beauty of brown women, the subdued and suppressed emotions that are a part of our collective experience of being human but yet we can’t share them.