Why Am I Making Art?

I should say: “How am I to live? How can I live the most meaningful life?”

I read my dad’s diary from the last year of his life. Mom had said he stopped writing it because it became too painful for him who was facing death while there was still so much beloved life in him, and loved ones to let go of, painfully. He was so present to me, so alive in the writing. A man grappling with the ever-clearer possibility of death, and still so acutely full of life. My father and mother both were courageous, lively people. My dad, a creative spirit and an artist at heart, my mom a caring angel who loved to help others in need, and herself an adventurous, strong, and sensuous woman who loved life. Both these beautiful spirits were not evident to me growing up. I experienced more their conditioned side, their poisonous pedagogy. And I got hurt by that. Now, I can uncover their beauty, their legacy. Now, I can own their essence in me. My dad’s diary, my mom’s 90^th Birthday letters from those who loved her and knew her the way I hadn’t, (both sent to me recently by my sister). Redemption inside of me. Uncovering of the good in me, clearing out the muck.

What does this have to do with, ‘why am I making art’?

“With awake senses I am seeing myself drifting toward the end” (dad in 1963, age 50). Some painful thoughts, he wrote, like the thought of letting go of his wife and daughters are too painful to think. I remember the last times I saw him. Me 12 or 13, he a sick man in bed unable to connect with me with words, to tell me the truth, to say that he loves me, to say good bye.

This is the reason why I make art! I start where he left off. I claim aliveness, and I claim the ability to tolerate what’s painful, true, shameful, difficult, dark, lonely, unresolved, troubling, yearning, hopeless, despairing. This is where I start: I make art out of the unspoken, unacknowledged, unknown, unnamable, unacceptable, unbearable. I make art from the belly of the Mystery!

Why am I making art? Because I have to. The creative process of making art integrates my brain, helps me stay sane, digest my life, and deal with the world around me.

Why am I making art? Because I care about the world! Because I’m passionate about presence, and because I believe that the ancient purpose of making art is to heal the individual as well as the community and the world. I believe that in connecting deeply in presence with my own inner process, whatever it may be in the moment, my art becomes a portal for healing, transformation, presence, nurturing, inspiration...