Kids Again... and Artistry

I feel like the title is a bit off, but I like it. Read this without placing too much consideration on the title of the post please.

Art has always been a bit of a touchy subject for me. When someone asks me if I have any artistic talents, I simply shrug and half-jokingly say "words, maybe." In perfect honesty, I think I'm decent with words, and at the very least I really like them :). Outside of word related things, my faculties as an artist could be summed up by saying "I'm a bit of a natural actor." I have to add in the word "natural" because if I do possess any stage-related skills, they definitely are not anything I attained through sheer volume of production—including my middle school drama class, I have been in 6 functions I would consider production; two of them I've done in college and I played the lead in Thomas Stoppard's "The Real Inspector Hound" during my senior year of high school (complete with a crappy Cockney accent).

On top of the fact that I don't qualify as too much of an artist, I found art to be boring and weird when I was introduced to it as a little kid. Granted, this was fairly standard for my age. I mean, let's be honest, there are really way too many rules for a young child to really be able to enjoy a museum. For the longest time, I carried on with my thought pattern from my childhood days and thought that art was stupid.

Recently though, I gave art a new shot and realized that I kinda love it. Maybe it has a lot to do with my musings on literature, music and other types of intellectual property (I'll get into that after the anecdotal story of this posting). These days, I rather like art. This past Saturday I visited a friend of mine from school in San Francisco. She's pretty cool and very much an artist. In her case, art is definitely a family thing—her dad is a professional artist (perhaps I'd do better to say makes his living through art, but that too I'll get at later). The relevance of her dad's career as an artist is hat he's very much in tune with current art resulting in my friend having one of the most exquisitely decorated houses I have ever seen. I'm not saying that because of the house was covered with original or duplications of Picasso's, Van Gogh's and Monet's, but because of the impeccable style of the art. It was more an "urban art" motif than any other one style, and I loved it. I basked in it and felt my respect for artistry increase many times over. See, that art had two major effects. The first was allowing me to recognize that being an adult doesn't mean I'll have to give up everything I learned to love in my youth; hip hop has an elegance and an "adult house" can still be elegant. Maybe I won't have to scrap my hoodie collection at age 27 :). The second effect was letting me get a feel for just what art can be for me. I was like a kid in a candy shop, but my sugar was artistic innovation, my dyes were vivid colors and and aesthetic elements. I was still eating candy, but now I was gorging on an intellectual treat causing a sugar rush to my imagination. I would call it a rebirth of my inner child, but I'm nearly too in touch with mine as it is. Let's instead call it an assurance of continued well being, something equivalent to my inner child being guaranteed a spot a Yale.

I wandered around her house absolutely astonished absorbing every piece of art I could find (and there was a lot of it). So, yeah, years after the effect is supposed to happen, I have viewed art and seen that it is good. My thoughts on the purpose of art and intellectual property are gonna be a separate post. Why? Because this is currently shaping up to be more of a place for me to draft term papers than to blog.