ampersand: living art
saturday, september 14, 2002


art is always alive for me - it's a part of me, of how i think, of how i see the world. more than images, art is words, music, movement. as an artist, i often find my art taking over. the characters i write about speak to me, the stories insist on being told, the designs must be created. for me, being an artist is a way of being. i can't be anything else.

music is my life blood it seems. it inspires me. it motivates me. it encourages me. sometimes i see images in my head for some of my novels when i hear certain songs. creed seems to become my "alden band" (alden being my imaginary world i write in), but they are not the only ones who show me pieces of my stories. to write i must have music on. i can't write in silence.

reading often does the same thing. i see the story as if i'm right there. for me characters are alive and no story has a definite ending unless every single character in the story dies. this is the foundation of my problems with writing short stories: how can you write a definite ending if you never see stories as having one? i never understood what made an ending clear cut and what makes it ambiguous.

this being involved with the story is one of the reasons i hated literary analyses for my classes. you have to pull yourself out of a story to analyze it. you can't just sit and enjoy the colors, textures, and emotions. my analyses classes have left me enjoying my reading a little less - not a lot less, but i notice bumps in the writing i easily skipped over before. sometimes i grieve for what i've lost in the process of being educated. stories still live for me, but not as much as they used to.

i used to draw once, a long time ago, but it has long fallen victim to a busy life and the desire to write. yet visual art is still very much a part of me. it finds expression on the web in my own site and the designs i create for others. the visual frames everything for me: my site, my writing, my reading, my music. all of it finds expression through the visual.

art lives in me. it works its way through me and out of me. it's my expression. it's who i am. like being unable to stop writing, i cannot NOT be an artist. it's as natural to me as breathing. and i just cannot imagine being without it.