Artists are people, but not normal people. Artists are their own species, I’ve decided. Shaina is an artist of sorts, in a school of artists, and she has become more of an artist because of it. There is something interesting and somewhat unique about an artistic high school like the one Shaina goes too — there is this fundamental give-and-take between the artistic pursuits and the academics. They aren’t entirely incompatible, but there is certainly a resentment between them. Like cats and dogs, each is unique, sometimes they get along, sometimes not. They have personalities.
If artisty is about creation, uniqueness, beauty, soul, inspiration, and learning is about study, repetition, fact, testing, proof, there is a disconnnect. And yet, both pursuits are about truth.
Still, artists are different. On the one hand, they have tremendous emotional drive that other people probably don’t have. More prone to mania, depression, or whatever we as society are classifying it as today, but it is raw and unfettered emotion, and that is what art is about.
While artists can be extremely insightful, they can also sometimes be extremely dense. While at times that they can be so thoughful and caring, at other times they can also be incredibly brutal and uncaring.
Artists are difficult to live with. Sometimes, you need to do some artistry of your own in attempting to mold them into a more subtle model…possibly slightly less artistic, which is a shame, but more livable, which is good.
It is the real world vs. the artists. It is the universal give and take. It is strange and scary and confusing and prone to small failures. And in taming the artist, one might dampen the artistry a bit. Sad, difficult, fraught with peril, possibly harmful, and yet so potentially rewarding. It’s probably worth it, I think.
I’m not sure where this came from, but I like it. Some of my arts teachers say that no one can understand what an artist is going through unless they are an artist too. They won’t understand why you can be so emotional or passionate, and that artists lives are harder than other people’s. I think the way people deal with this is drugs. I’d say 65%+ people at my school are on some kind of mood adjusting drug so that they won’t have constant mood swings or depression. Is this something that we should be muffling? It seem wierd that the thing that makes us artists are the things people try to change.
I am an artist. What you said is true, but I disagree with trying to make us “less” of an artist. No, it isn’t possible, but the fact that someone would try that is offensive to artists. We don’t know why we are the way we are, but whatever happens happens. And why a lot of us do drugs is for ideas, also. And we like alterations of the mind, some of us even enjoy some stages of depression, for further investigation of their own feelings.