Talking Back
What your art sees in you.
What if your art could talk back to you? What would it say to you about you when you were in the midst of creating it? What if it could hear your primordial scream at the world or you crying your heart out on the canvas, plucking the strings or pressing a shutter button? What if it could manifest itself into a voice and tell you everything it saw in you?
What if it could feel everything you put into it? Everything that you were pouring into it? Do you influence your art, or does your art influence you? It can be said that the output of your work is a reflection of how you felt at that time. But would your art feel the same way about you? Would it tell you the deeper (and sometimes darker) meaning of what you were doing?
Would it say that you were in pain? Maybe that you were feeling nostalgic. Or that it would tell you that you were in a good mood that day. Perhaps you had fears and anxieties that you were trying to convey, but couldn’t quite do it with your chosen medium. What if it told you, what you really wanted or needed to hear.
I think my photography would tell me that I was not capturing the moment as I was truly feeling. Whether happy or sad, I was only making something out of what I could find around me. My photographs would tell me the truth about me, even if what I took didn’t.
I make it a point not to insert too much of my actual self in my photos, even trying to prevent my shadow from showing up. I might tell myself that it’s a composition thing, but perhaps it’s rather just a way of hiding myself from my own truth. Because I don’t want my work to see me or to see how I felt at that moment. Because I don’t want it to know how I felt when I took that photograph.
But if I can’t show my true self to my art, then who can I show it to? Will I be forever hiding behind my art?
“Art is not handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced".’
- Leo Tolstoy
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Great piece, I'm gonna reflect on the questions you ask. I have tunnel vision and I'm colorblind, that definitely influenced my photography style, but I've never asked myself why I like urban settings so much, small anonymous figures and nostalgia.
I might be a bit scared of what my art would tell me lol! But i'm with you Brandon, there's always something held back with me too - i'm not sure exactly what that is, but I feel it strongly at times. I also feel that ( and I think i've said this to you or elsewhere before ) the 'doing/creating/ act is always so much more important and rewarding to me than the outcome. So perhaps what it says is not quite so important. That said, we all send our work out there to be consumed and interpretted, to represent us, so perhaps we should take the time to ask what is says about us?!