More than one of my posts have been about some facet of being an artist, and tonight I found myself wondering, just what makes an artist?

No matter the medium one works in, there are limitations. A writer must adhere to the rules of grammar and sentence structure, a potter must respect the physics of drying clay and glaze composition, a programmer must write compile-able code, and so on. However, there comes a day when one realizes that, as creator, one is essentially playing god. An author can have *anything* they wish happen to their characters, a painter can transmute what they see with their eyes into something more inline with what they see in their head… with me so far?

That moment of realization, when one steps back and thinks, “wait, I can make *anything I want*” – that’s what I’m talking about.

BUT

And I can’t stress this enough – but, this doesn’t happen until one knows the fundamentals. Any full of them self art student can throw random blotches of paint at a canvas and call themselves the next Jackson Pollack (and a good many do). This might mean you’re a very good, even slavish imitator, but it does not mean you are anything approaching an artist.

So, there are two things that it’s very easy for those who might become artists to do. One, they can let their chosen medium hold them back, becoming a technically proficient craftsman, but never moving into the fully creative sphere. Or, two, they can ignore all restraints and rules and produce very enthusiastic but still amateurish work. Now you can make a living doing either of these things – I see it happen all the time. But to really be an artist, for me, is to walk the line in between. Always learning the technical side of your chosen craft while never letting the constraints of that craft hobble you. It’s not an easy balance.

Thanks to a growing tolerance for NyQuil, I am fighting a holding action with my head cold, yet am still unable to sleep. This has led to some middle of the night puttering around and then random surfing.

Random surfing, of course, leads to random thoughts.

What is up with everyone and their grandmother calling themselves an artist? Once upon a time, the term was barely even complementary, and artists as a whole were tolerated because of the contribution they were able to make to society and culture at large, but were considered, personally and individually, to be not the sort of folks one wanted to associate with.

Word associative stigmas have a habit of fading in this day and age, but do we have to use the word artist to refer to everyone who produces *any* sort of content? Writers, musicians, programmers, and who knows who else are suddenly being lumped under the banner of artist. Of course, some of them are.

Most, on the other hand, are tradesmen. Or crafters. People of skill who create things. Well and good. But artist used to mean something more. It meant that you put something of yourself into what you made. That it was something more than just a product or commodity or (god help me) intellectual property. It was, well, art. I don’t see a lot of art being produced these days. Certainly not by the people everyone keeps telling me are “artists”.

Second thought – content producers and artists alike have something in common. (Actually they have almost everything in common, but moving on from that…) What we make our livings from is far more jealously guarded than what we create for ourselves. What we produce to sell is hoarded, rarely put on the web; and when it is, it’s ringed with as many notices of ownership and copyright as one is able to muster. What we produce for ourselves (or, what no one is willing to pay us to produce/create but which we create anyway) is given like a gift; sometimes with no strings at all, sometimes with a token request. Feedback, linkbacks, a small monetary donation – you get the picture.

We (artists) need to have both kinds of artwork in order to survive. Too much work done “purely for love” and one will starve. Too much “I’m getting paid to do this” stuff and all the joy goes out of what you do. In spite of this, I do sometimes wish that everything I create could be of the “purely for love, give it like a gift” sort.

Specifically, Tolkien. Over the last year, there have been dozens of articles and op-ed pieces about the role of women in Tolkien’s work. Or rather, the lack of role. I don’t care. I love the books, I love the movies, I love the artwork (well, some of the artwork. The Hildebrant brothers don’t do much for me, but Alan Lee rocks) As for the female characters and how they aren’t there – so what? Is every author supposed to anticipate shifting social values fifty years post publication and cast his/her novels accordingly?

This meme is more annoying than the usual “well, the author really means this/that/some other thing” kind of lit crit that I grew to know and abhor in school. How the hell does some academic crawl into the head of a (possibly deceased) author and figure out that they were thinking at the exact moment they put pen to paper? Who cares? Can’t a great story just *be* a really great story?

Oh, wait. We’re dealing with Art and Literature and lots of other pretentiously capitalized concepts that will leads us to Higher Meaning and… yes! Even world peace!

Here’s what I think. Art is not philosophy. Nor is it religon. Even if it was either of them, it still wouldn’t be something you could peer into and discover the deep, musty scerets of the soul because people have been trying that with religon and philosophy and, by and large, they haven’t gotten too far with them either. At best, art, philosophy, and religon are starting points for finding truth and The Meaning Of Life inside oneself. None of the big answers will come from a book, no matter how good it is.

So back to Tolkien. Who, when you get down to it, was just a guy. Shaped by his time and his world (which was very different from the one we know today) and writing because he loved it. He wasn’t trying to create a world that would be gender-politically acceptable to future generations even if such a feat would have been possible. He was just doing what artists have always done. He created something. It was not an allegory, it was not a political tract, it was not a philosophical guide to enlightment. It was a story. A really good one.

Lately, various people have commented to me that it’s odd that someone who is very creative would also be a, well, “techie”. I never saw much odd with getting to know the innards of my computer (and hey, look – it’s another marketable skill!) while at the same time using it to create art, but now I’ve been thinking about the science of art.

Once upon a time, artists had to be as much scientists as creators. A painter had to understand what chemicals created what pigments, and how those pigments would interact with linseed oil, or gum arabic, or whatever other medium they were using. A sculptor had to know the specific properties of different stones , or the expansion/contraction variables of different woods, or the correct purity of clay so that their work would survive the creation process and last more than a few years. Every photographer had to be as much chemist as artist; ditto for potters, who not only had to know the exact compositions of different glazes, but also what glazes would produce what effects in combination with different clays, under different temperatures and times, and what effects and chemicals would not only produce the nicest looking finishes, but which would then be safe to eat off of and which would be safe only for display.

Most artists practicing today have a choice – they don’t have to create all their materials from scratch if they don’t want to. (though some still do) Art stores are common enough that even little one horse towns can boast one. (My small town did – a little mom and pop place.) Even if you couldn’t get to an art store, mail order catalogs like Pearl, Windsor & Newton, and Utrecht filled the bill. (I used to go through my grandparent’s art catalogs and make up wish lists)

Time was, there wasn’t a whole industry devoted to making art supplies. Painters would grind their own pigments from locally occuring minerals, and mix them on their own according to formulas passed down from teacher to student. Potters gathered and purified their own clay, sculptors made deals with local quarries for stone.

And this brings me back to my point (because I really do have one) – why shouldn’t I understand my artistic medium as well as any painter of yore understood his or her pigments? The computer and printer are my pigments and canvas, and if I don’t know them inside and out, how am I going to be able to produce decent work?

Now we have NJ’s poet laureate being asked to step down because he implied in a poem that US and Israeli leaders had foreknowledge of the WTC attacks.

Wow. A poem…. a freaking poem people… and there are elected officials demanding he resign. He’s being branded a liar and a perpetuator of lies. Instead of perhaps looking at this piece and asking, “what does our reaction tell us about ourselves?”

My god, it even mostly *about* that day. It was about all the other days. All the other reasons we as a people have to hang our heads in shame. Because the good people among us did not act, and let atrocities happen that we then sanitize and put in textbooks.

This is not some journalist, whose supposed job is to report the cold, hard facts and nothing else. This is a poet. His job is to make everyone *think*. A poet who does nothing other than feed us self congratulatory pap is a traitor to the long line of truth speakers who came before. He is no poet, only a propagandist. Poetry is the land of allegory, aphorism, metaphor, and sideways thinking. In poetry, a rose is never just a rose, and a line supposing that the US government sat back and took no action as people died means *much more than that*.

I read that line and I didn’t just think of that day a year ago. I thought of all the foreign journalists *before* Daniel Pearl who were killed on assignment. I thought about the bombing of embassies and naval ships that elicited no public or journalistic uproar. I thought about all the things that happen in this world every freaking day that our government AND EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US turn a blind eye to. Those lines, those words weren’t just a condemnation of smug legislators, they were a commendation of every single one of us.

You cannot condemn the US government without condemning the people of this country. And I do. Because it took *this* to get us off our asses. I am disgusted with my leaders for their smug, sanctimonious, wrapped in the flag “war” that they are attempting to wage. I am disgusted with my fellow citizens for their willingness to parrot whatever CNN tells us without even wondering if there are other facts that we are not being told.

Or, as Carl Gregory put it better than I can right now:

“His is definitely a poem that gets people to start asking questions at a time when people in power don’t want us to ask questions”

The US and Israeli governments probably didn’t know what was up. (Because they didn’t *want* to know, an angry part of my brain whispers to me) But my government has lied to me enough that it’s become my boy who cried wolf. I’ll never be able to believe it/them totally about anything.

So the government wants to lean on the arts to show only what it wants shown. Speak only what it wants spoken. A year ago I asked, “where are we going?”. I’m asking it again, a little further down the path. I don’t like what I see behind me. I like what I see ahead of me even less. For too long parts of our society have been trying to muzzle the arts under the guise of decency, economy, and relevance. Now, with the anvil of patriotism, they are ready to sling rocks at a poet who writes words they don’t like. What’s next? Painters of “un-patriotic” images? Publishers of “un-patriotic” books?

When the government starts leaning on the arts, are blacklists really that far behind?