Our Artist Friends (& Why We Need Them)

www.natashagouveia.org - vote for her work at this Artists Wanted Competition by clicking here

Through our lives, we all encounter a few genuinely creative people. They're the ones who tend to think, act, and live slightly differently than the rest of us - sometimes seemingly out of step, they are tapped into some part of this world that a lot of us just don't see.

Sand sculpture by Dori the Giant - see more of her work here

It's as though there's an almost spiritual barrier that they get to enter, and we don't. And I think this is a very positive and healthy way to look at it. But for the majority of us - the ones who don't get to see what's behind that wall - it's easy to brush the thoughts, ways & ideas of these people off as fleeting or (unfortunately) useless. I'm sure you've heard before how artists we now revere went unappreciated in their time - JRR Tolkien himself was denied the Nobel Prize due to "inferior storytelling" and it's fair to say that his inferiorities have helped shape literary (and now cinematic) generations.  Well, he's not alone.

Video by James Vanderwoerd - see more of his work here

We need our artist friends because they have a way of exposing us to things we normally wouldn't see, and in ways we wouldn't see them. And I think that it's utterly crucial to not only celebrate their work, but encourage them as individuals to keep on keeping on. I've seen too many people throw their hands up in exhaustion and join the routine just to avoid the criticism that the heart of an artist tends to come across. My own family hosts one of these exhausted artists because he just hadn't been fed the spiritual food of encouragement that he really needed.



The rest of us, the ones who don't see behind the wall, need to give our artist friends space to breathe, to create, to make mistakes we otherwise might not, because in doing so they may pioneer something profoundly beautiful.

www.johnbutlerphoto.com

So please: let your artist friend know you need him or her, and that this world needs their work. Whether through prose or painting, drawing or sculpting, or (my personal bias) photography, they need to keep pursuing what they see behind the wall - and we need to appreciate it.