Dear Artist

Dear artist,

Your mind is the only envy I have in this world. Watching you compose your work, seeing this immense creativity flow so effortlessly from your head to your hand is one of the most mesmerizing experiences I’ve encountered. Who did you learn this style from that has evolved into such a unique and personal identity?

I usually call myself a designer to avoid the pressure of being an artist. The expectation to create something profound is too much for me to handle right now. Sometimes I think I’m not crazy enough.

I’ve heard countless interviews from Basquiate, Bowie, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Calder, Eames, O’Keeffe, and so many other iconic names. I cannot express their language nor their essence myself. They are all so unique in their choice of words, with the process of their thoughts, yet some how they are all similar in the fact that one can not imagine how their minds can weave together such abstruse ideas.

Creating is a powerful thing. The ability to see something in your head and transcend it into reality is immensely overlooked. I think god must have been an artist. If every artist has a muse I wonder who gods was?

Aside from Warhol and god, theres also the everyday artists. The ones I pass at school, the ones in small galleries, the street vendors, and even some of my friends and family. Though they may not have reached icon status, they too have a special mind, the mind that cannot quite be understood. I envy that mysterious, strange mind.

Elijah Teague 1018.17

Surrealism, brought to life through the likes of Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Sigmund Freud
and Giorgio de Chirico. A form of art that leaves me puzzled and amazed. As much as I appreciate these artists technical skills and painting ability, the element of their works that bewilders and astonishes is what their minds must have been thinking to create such alien images. How one can take a topic such as the after math of war and translate it into a man emerging from an egg shell, with gaunt bodies representing how the world used to be pointing back at it (as shown in Salvador Dali’s “Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man”) the title itself is beyond the thought process capabilities of most human beings.

I wonder if they know when they’ve created a master piece? Or when their quote will live on in history for hundreds of years? How strange it would feel to have your painted canvas studied by millions of people. Maybe if one surrounds oneself with artists minds and works long enough and studies hard enough they too can begin to think like one. Can you learn genius? It’s definitely not something that is passed down through parents. It could however be a side affect of parents. Wether they are extremely encouraging and supportive or strict and oppressive, both seem to be compatible for raising an exceptional artist mind.

So I call myself a designer for now. In the future maybe I’ll have the confidence to call myself an artist. Maybe I’ll have surrounded myself for a long enough time that ,similar to Dalis painting, I too will emerge from the egg shell and be able to speak and think profoundly.