Blank Canvas

So here's the thing about being an artist: your mind can never settle. The sprouts rise up through the concrete of this world constantly. "Look a new leaf" and you just HAVE to turn it, or the strongest variant of frustration will overtake your fragile body.

The thing is, we have the tendency to enlarge the meaning of anonymity. If something is incognito or blank, a canvas, a person with a bare face, a blinking cursor, we yearn to fill it. Grab a bit of coal, caress a bit of copper, string together an array of beads, and you call it art. We call it purpose.

Because what's more purposeful than filling spaces? Filling voids. Empty spaces don't feel like home. So this artist tendency bleeds into every episode of life. Must fill the empty space. Must feel the empty space. Must fill the empty space with something beautiful.

So I sit here as my spirit starts to broadcast what I've apparently falsified: chaos is dangerous. But my spirit says no. Maybe chaos is just filling those empty spaces. I love that my mind can be an advocate of my madness at times. And that's another thing, all artists have gone mad.

How else do you explain makeup looks that make us shapeshift into another being. What about music that makes your entire body vibrate, even on the lowest setting; and the way the musician gets so lost in it, that their eyes roll back or they start wailing. Or a book so jarring, you dream about it for weeks while the author has written that entire book primarily from her dreams? Perhaps artists can make others go mad too. Perhaps that is actually the art form. Affecting the consumer in such a way, that they question their own reality.

And that's the fun part about being an artist. There are no constraints to how far you can go. Sure, if you want to appease society and uphold copyright and other legal statements, you do have some confines. But we can be wild. We can be beastly. We can be soft and quiet and still get the attention of the masses. I think my life is art, and yours is too.

Constantly snuggled between chaos and order : art and a blank canvas. Constantly leaving a trail of paint behind with our auric fields. Who needs yellow paint? I've got a ton! Constantly humming our individual songs by reminiscing on memories, through whispers in the dark to our lovers, secrets kept with God.

So, if we are art ourselves, then I guess we are also home. I think about this when I feel homesick for a place I've never been. I just know that I need to flee the place I'm at now. But where does my soul want to rest? I can never quite figure that out. But if I am home, then my soul rests here. And if I am homesick, then that means I am longing for parts of myself I've decided to flush out. Maybe I flushed it onto an empty canvas, put it in front of the eyes of millions, only to hear a singular applause. Maybe that's why I am homesick. I keep putting my art out there for the approval, when in reality, art doesn't need approval. It is wild, remember?

No one approves of our ancestral wildness. They shun it. Don't understand it. Blame it on chemical imbalances, too much sunlight, too little sunlight, too much time working, not enough time working, too much too much, too little too little.

But you see, artists tend to enlarge the meaning of anonymity. Maybe we don't yearn for our art to be seen instead of us. Maybe we want people to understand that we are the art, and that you cannot separate the two. See me, and see my soul in its chaotic nature. I am a blank canvas, for my hands only.