The Necessity of Making Art

One of the biggest influences in my life is Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I learned so much about what it meant to be creative from that book. The most important lesson being that art doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be yours. A singer/songwriter that I admire said that artists always take the pain they have and put it in their art so that they can share their pain with others.

And I think that’s the beauty of art. That it provides a way for us to the pain we experience and create something good out of something bad. 

I don’t think it’s any surprise to me that adult coloring books are the latest trend. I know that when I color, my energy starts focusing more on creating something rather than letting my thoughts go towards emotions like anger or anxiety or sadness. Sometimes, we can choose colors that express the things that we feel.

But art isn’t just a matter of crayons and paper. The first time I experienced art therapy was indirectly, when I created this shield using oil pastels and a pencil:

Sometimes, people can choose words to express their feelings. Some do so through writing stories. Others do it through poetry. I tend to express my emotions in a mix of both.

Yet there is also another beautiful aspect about art. There’s something more to art than just an outlet for emotions. In the act of making art, we become creators. It isn’t just found in painters, drawers, and sculptors who can literally create a new thing using materials and tools. Fantasy and sci-fi writers create entire lands and universes in a process called “worldbuilding.” Mystery writers get into the minds of villains in the hopes of understanding evil. Romance writers explore the nature of love and how it manifests in two people. Dancers and actors become experts of their own bodies and show how beauty can exist through movement and gestures and expressions.

I always marvel at the concept that there are people who believe that the universe, this entire, beautiful, vast universe filled with stars and planets, came at random, out of nothing for no reason whatsoever. How can people look at the beauty of this world: the biodiversity of every animal and insect and plant, the intricate colorings of every single butterfly and flower and bird, and the colors painted in the sky and think that it’s nothing but cold hard scientific theories? Science is a part of our world, but can it explain the purpose of beauty? Even if you try to explain it with “the continuation of the species” it doesn’t explain why there is beauty in the vastness of space, in the various blues and greens and grays of the oceans, and the death and rebirths of the millions of stars in our galaxy. There is evidence of a Divine Artist because we see His art everywhere.

But honestly, I think the words of a saint can say the necessity of artists better than I can.