From the Desk of Rick Santiago

Art is the creative ability and skill to make something tangible from one’s imagination. To make something from nothing is Art. Defining “What is Art” maybe as difficult as defining what is the color white. White comes in many shades but we still call them white. Sometimes we name different shades of white the same way we label different styles of ART. Art comes in many forms, like figurative paintings, abstracts, sculptures, poetry, installations, etc., but we still label them as Art.

From a psychological perspective, art is not defined by the medium or technical skill, but by the cognitive and emotional processes it triggers. Art is fundamentally a tool for communication and processing the human experience. A bridge that transforms raw emotion into shared meaning. Psychology of Art

Why would I paint at all? Why did people draw on walls all those years ago with nothing to gain from it? Maybe pride, maybe simple joy. I wonder about it a lot and it keeps me just wanting to be simple and honest. cheers… Glenn Brady

Sigmund Freud applied his psychoanalytic methods – similar to those used in dream interpretation – to decode the hidden psychological meanings in literature and art. A Window to the Unconscious. Artists tap into their deepest, most primal thoughts, revealing fundamental truths about the human condition. [1, 2] His theories heavily influenced the 20th-century Surrealist art movement, where painters like Salvador Dalí used dream-like imagery to express the subconscious mind. [1, 2, 3]

Why do I make Art, for me, because I can and be good at it. It’s the gratification of taking something I saw, touched, tasted or smelled, then process it into something that I can share, hoping my audience might appreciate. I think for most artist, it’s the ability to take one’s imagination and have the creativity and energy to put on canvas, sculpt in clay or stone or write it on paper. The ability to create something tangible from something imagined. – Rick Santiago

In the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, the character played by Richard Dreyfuss displays a great example of what I call “Surreal Pop Art“. Driven by something he can’t quite seem to put his finger on and something beyond his ability to control, over and over he sculpts a vision from his mind, a vision that he does not understand. Although his first efforts don’t satisfy his mind’s eye, he continues to search, to refine, until the time comes that he makes the connection between what is coming out of him and what it means. – Kris Hoglund

Art Has Many Meanings, here are a few:

• Art, Dope and Saving the World
• Story Book Art from the Funny Farm
• Outsider Art
• Existential Art
• How the meaning of Art emerges
• Surreal Pop Art
• What is Art to Artists

re:  Ibsen said, “There must be a troll in what I write.”  Art, today, encompasses the dream postponed into anything-goes.  Justified in letting the artist descend into mediocrity, spiraling around an ego put upon a pedestal.  As if, all that a person does is art.  And it is.  But I have no time for it.  I agree with Harold Bloom in a recent interview.  He asked, would you want just anyone to do surgery on you?  Of course not.  You want someone to know what they are doing before they cut into you.  Yet today we look at the arts as if everything is the fine craftsmanship of a great artist, and much of it isn’t.  Until you become yourself what benefit can you be to others?  Mediocrity appeals to the mass, and it appeals to the mass ego.  And though it may be art, it is not the exceptional dream, enchanting the child, like a kiss walking home to my knowledge, in an unformulated illustration which wakes me up.  Michael Carrico

*Art is when Vision, Creativity and Talent find each other in the Dark…

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