Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. (Kurt Vonnegut, Man Without a Country)
Snug mountain pond
When you read the phrase practicing an art, you think: what? Painting fine pictures? Sculpting statues? Writing a best-selling novel or an article published in a national magazine? These are all examples of art, all goals that some people reach. For a lot of us, we love artistic expression, we sense we have an artistic bent, but wonder how someone who is not a professional artist, whether writer, sculptor, painter, dancer or whatever, can do art.
Art is expressing reality through the prism of a person’s eyes and ears. An artist is someone, and can be anyone, interpreting the world around him or her, voicing a feeling, or expressing a response to some thing, person, or event. Kurt V. said practicing an art no matter how well or how badly is still a really important thing to do because it makes your soul grow. It expands a person in a foundational, important way.
A big part of The Life Literary’s goal is to model and encourage doing art with words, expressing feelings and responses to the world literarily. This is why I’m showing you seventeen pictures I took of water. This collection demonstrates two artistic actions. These scenes caught my eye because they show water in interesting contexts. My snapping these shots was an artistic action. Then I wrote a caption for each photo, a sentence or a phrase to capture something about the picture or about my reaction to it, or maybe my attempt at a word play, like “indirect ducks” two words that sound similar, not quite a rhyme but close. That’s the second artistic action. I’m pretty sure none of the pictures are award winners, nor the captions, Pulitzer prize nominees. It doesn’t matter. I’m practicing an art, enlarging my soul, and having fun doing it. These are good enough for me to enjoy and, I think, for a few others too.
Consider adding a bit of literary to your life by adding captions to pictures you have already taken. Or consider grabbing your camera and taking shots of something that interests you like water or flowers, or people, or perhaps the architectural features of buildings. Express yourself and react to the world around you by practicing an art, no matter how well or badly.
