IS ART REALLY PAINFUL?

[Reina -76- ARTIST]

how as your passion for art hurt or distanced yourself from your surroundings or your feelings?

REINA -76-
ARTIST

[Max Herschfeld]

My passion for art has heightened my connectedness with the surroundings and keeps me in touch with my feelings. Art can be introspective enough to be very painful, but "art" that distances you from your own feelings wouldn't really be "art," it might be decoration, or design, or masturbation, or artifice, but it won't be art.

I have to be connected to my thoughts and the sublime nature of just "seeing" to be able to paint. I have to be open & receptive in order to see. I used to mine the depths of pain for art, but it gets old & limiting eventually.

[Luke D. Yocum]

When i was seventeen i left the farm fields of the dutch country . I was kind of going threw a early rumspringa.I like so many moths drawn to the bright lights of New York city got their and then i was their. I was to young and immature to of been a painter i see that now .I tried hard for several months and got into a up and coming seen that was very competitive.I couldn't deal with the pressure and soon found myself shooting dope. From their i went side ways real quick but i couldn't stop working the more heroin i did the better my work got the more complex it got.I could focus on the drawing detail and other thing that needed a fine touch i had the patience to deal with it.Then just that fast the drug works against you and takes your brain on vacation.I still couldn't leave the city because iwas going to make it and all those people who told me how great my work was where going to help me but the truth was i damaged all those relationships while under the influence or while i was sick and jonesn.I ended up on the street the thoughts of large canvases and fancy people viewing my work still in my head My family finally tracked me down and brought me home to get me help . I left and went back to NYC three days later sold a painting and got high real high then in listed in the Army.For 4 long years i desperately wanted back out on the street to get into the seen again to live and breath Chelsea the desire for painting is so much stronger then heroin I will give up and sacrifice what ever to continue painting.I'm the guy in walmart 4am rip n off paint and brushes ,pastels and paint markers.Tonight i got 2 bottles of gesso. Even thou I'm o.k now financially i still have to be in tune with the street in alt least some aspects . I think that i like so many of you could probably never do anything else I'm damaged goods. The longest i ever held a job was seven months and I'm 27 years old now. My own father wont employ me anymore because i used are family company's assets to promote my shows and i took allot of real expensive supplies mostly high quality paper to work on. When i suffer my work gets brilliant when im good my work sucks ass.So i plan to just go with it and live my life. Well yeah I'm a fuck bag but i love to paint . Luke D. Yocum

[Tassa Rose]

I must have a certain amount of PAIN or PRICKLY stimulation of sorts, in order for ME to write. OFTEN, (not so oddly, in fact for an ARTIST); ANGER proves to be a CATALYST...PAIN-ANGER....some kind of JOLT!~ Anything is Preferable than a State of Inertia for the Artist. I'd sooner be Angry or Hurt; Feeling Like My Guts were in FLAMES...(not really--but for the sake for a good piece of BLOG-Short-Story-Journal)....than feel NOTHING at ALL. As Sinatra said in a popular song, "ALL....or NOTHING at ALL." and this man (like him or not) made millions crooning his feelings from a Musical Sheet to our Earz. Thanks, Reina for tossing this one out to us:). Just T

[Cleveland Dean]

Art is a trade off. From the artist vantage point it allows us to kill off a part of our being in order to give it life in a different form. This can be viewed as a metaphysical change...even a resurrection. Yet still, an ARTIST, not merely a painter or sculpture or writer or performer etc should feel some degree of psychological and in some matters physical pain when a creation is born. Is childbirth not painful. Our creations are our children of the subconscious. We must go through a/our own degree of pain in order to give birth to something joyous.

Art should distance one from their surroundings, be it viewed by an/the artist or anyone else. Art is supposed to transcend us to a place where inquiry, fear, joy, vulnerability,assertiveness, naivety, wisdom and any other realm that can be thought of. Art is meant to displace us from the comforts of conventional understanding and take us to a place of interpretation. If a work does not move us to a even momentary "different place"...can it really be called art?

maybe we create pain to garnish love.
maybe we love to create pain
maybe we speak to be understood
maybe our lovely passion of pain is art.

maybe I just need a drink.

[mukhtar]

I think it is a romantic mith that you have to suffer or use dope to produce great art. It is a lack of self confidence.Yes art is painful and frustrating, you just have to keep at it. Some of my work went through a phase of "This is a total mess" but somehow most of the time , it falls into place.

[Tassa Rose]

I am realizing that EVERY DAY is an EXCUSE for ART; and I am a CREATOR if I CHOOSE to BE...haha; and to get out off my head without any damn shit in my system anymore is GREAT....I can blog or babble or paint ABSTRACTIONS that appear just because....My MIND is THERE; and I NO LONGER GIVE A DAMN about what the "SPECTATORS" think....IF I FEEL LIKE SCRIBBLING on A SERVIETTE; THEN SOBEITTE! DAMN...There ARE No More RULES...and I am Creating More WITHOut The Angst Of The HighSchool Puppy-Love Gone Putrid and then Getting A Sprained Ankle on God-Damned Field DAy...Why the DRAMA? IF It Comes, Then It May...I Am Ready:)--Let the Scintillations Begin!!!

[Not Rondo]

why is your comment crossed out?

what passion? art is oxygen

[Tassa Rose]

WHY is THIS PINK?

[Not Rondo]

why is what pink?

[Wade Spiker]

I have always had a distinct feeling of separation from everything around me. I have used art in the past as a way to bridge that separation. When I was sixteen I smoked weed for the first time, but have since stopped(Darn drug testing, stopped when I was 26). But I used to have an extreme hightening of that feeling, to the point where I could feel as if I was sitting in the center of a round room, watching the world play away in two dimensions on the walls around me. It was so intense that I felt the cold and even fancied the metal of the chair. My memories as a child follow this pattern with that level. Even now when I get an extreme situation going I can step back into the room and work myself almost like a puppet. I have always thought that my art connected me to life, a personal blessing from him.
Wade

[Tassa Rose]

WADE, I LIKE THE WAY YOU GIVE THE READER AN INSIGHT INTO YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS AS A PERSON AND THEN, HOW THE ART YOU PRODUCE REFLECTS YOUR PRESENT PSYCHOLOGICAL STATE. COOL. BET YOU ARE A SPUR OF THE MOMENT CREATOR:)- DUNNO, JUST A GUESS...WHEN THE WHIM HITS ME; I CREATE, and MUCH LIKE YOU, IT FLOWS FROM LEVELS THAT OFT are "FROM THE DEPTHS" OF MY PAST> AYE, MYSELF, THE PUPPET ON THE STRING OF WHAT LIFE TELLS ME! THUS, I RESPOND THROUGH MY POETRY, BLOGGING, (ONCE PAINTING/SKETCHING), OR JUST THOUGHTS. THANKS.

[Wade Spiker]

I find that when I paint, I just want to lock myself in a room and go at it. But I have a family and 2 small kids and I have found that this makes that nearly impossible.. So I have adapted and I work in spurts. I work on several things at once. I pick up a piece and do a layer or section then I put it down and work on another project. I come back to them and see them from the viewpoint of the layperson , and it helps me find my mistakes before I finish the work. When I get close to finishing them I make every excuse in the world not to stop!
Wade