Thoughts on Artists?

The path of an artist is the best and worst path a person could walk.

Constantly, slowly, being bled dry of all we are. Blood and will evaporate faster than they can be replenished; feeding the ever-hungry appetite of our creations only for us to suffer the watching as they fail. Though that’s no better than the drunk relief of success, where we bleed ourselves three times as fast in the inebriated haze and reap the results in cold sobriety.

Forever resigned to falling far into the watcher's abyss – where others’ words slice, their eyes stab clean through. That fear so consuming is steals your breath, then all else if you’re not careful. Wounds turn to scabs but never to scars, always a tug away from reopening and costing more blood than can be spared. Artists who have scars are enamoured with the ugliness of them. It fuels their work, though at the expense of dignity – shame in exposing themselves to cruelly compassionate comments. God forbid pity is spared for an artist. What do they stand to gain?

Always taking parts of our souls and chunks of our hearts to be reshaped into exquisite beauty we ourselves may never dream to be. Our medium of choice, our method of death. Decorating our delicate inners, we send ourselves into the world – tangible and ready to fracture. Then rinse and repeat. Cutting out our hearts until there’s nothing left to beat blood round our bodies. Offering up our souls until the face in the mirror shows a person who has long ceased to exist. What little blood we have left. How useless our searching has been.

We are tumbling round the creative cycle with no way to stop of soften our falling. Perceiving failure we fall harder, perceiving success we push to go faster. There is none as selfish as we, pushing ourselves to such limits then vomiting the aftermath into existence and expecting praise.

But for the pleasure of casting such need for creation into practise, what can't we justify? In the endless pursuit to actualise our personal epiphanies of thought and feeling, any pain is better than the maddening itch of ideas under the skin. If left too long they bubble up to rash on the surface, demanding to be scratched out into open air. Such ideas must be outlet or thoroughly tamped, least we artists go mad at our own hand.

Because that’s never happened before.

Willingly we step into a box of our own creation and hide ourselves away in the furthest recess of our minds. We beg to be let free of our prison despite never reaching for the key. Deficient in our dark room, we are never kissed by the morning sun as it casts blessing through curtains. To deny ourselves such simple pleasure is telling in its own right - the kind of self-destruction we crave. Our deaths are slow and tortured; they creep in to sit alongside us long before sickness or age catches up.

Perhaps it’s selfish in itself to make the path of creation seem as anything less than an incurable fear. Fear of the companion which sits beside us and watches as we contemplate all we do not need to. It must be bored. If not, it must be lonely. It likely cannot find company among any others, being as feared as it is. Artist fear it too – but fear fuels feeling, and then creation is born.

By creating, we become secure. There’s a finality in knowing a part of ourselves will remain in the world, even after the expansive darkness of our companion finally opens its jaws to gobble us whole. Creation is a cosy blanket for those who know they will be forgotten. Their desire to live will follow them into death, will be known through their work.

Truly none other is so selfish. No other path as excruciatingly beautiful as our own.

Artists truly are incomparable.