The word ‘art’ comes from Latin ars and meant skill or craft based on the Indo-European meaning “to arrange”. Today ‘art’ is generally understood to be the results and process of making something that has not existed before and is not a necessity, as in biological survival.

Sometimes art  is differentiated as being “fine” or “applied”. “Fine art” refers to the “purity of the discipline” or purpose; “applied art” refers to objects created for functional and everyday use where the creator of the work may be called a craftsperson.

Exploring the various art processes heightens awareness of art as a whole. While paying intellectual attention to composition and subject matter, do not ignore the physicality and sensory experience of creation - the feel of a pencil or brush, a mallet and chisel on stone, the sensation of seeing your words emerge on a plane of white, a rush of pleasure as you know something that cannot be taken from you.

Art in the widest meaning is the expression of imagination fueled by the desire to create, to leave one's mark that transcends the temporal. The artist - the one who makes art - be it a visual image, rhythmic sounds, or abstract words to poetry, takes the imagined to material form.

Global PathMarker Carl Gustav Jung said, “Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. . . . To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.” Modern Man in Search of a Soul. 1955

19th century American author Mark Twain, of all the individuals represented in the Global PathMarker collection, is the one most clearly related to the art field. His word pictures show a highly skilled and sophisticated literary artist who employed the parable (Jesus) to insert seeds of thinking into the unconscious of people who otherwise could not have heard the lessons.

On the broadest scale everyone is an artist with the artifacts of our lives, mundane or exalted, as records of human history. Individuals who emerge from the masses to be labeled as Artist are those gifted with more sensitive natures and heightened capacities to skillfully manipulate disparate materials.

Marshall McLuhan said, “The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964

Beyond the “lonely” artist, public art can become landmarks that people identify with, strengthening community bonds, sharing and preserving the essence of beliefs and tradition. The building, writing, dancing, concerts and exhibits of Art can be collaborative, such as community celebrations and festivals. For instance, the Troost Ave Festival in Kansas City  (2005-2020) was a powerful tool for social activism, challenging the status quo and giving voice to marginalized groups. We shut down Troost (unthinkable!) and threw a party, erasing the east-west divide, for at least one day. Harken back to 1960s “Happening” that provided inspiration to improve the a small place in the global scheme of things.

“People create stories create people or rather stories create people create stories.”

~ Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)

“Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same, absolutely.”

~ Josef Albers | Albers Foundation | YouTube | Amazon

“If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you. It may break your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right.”

~ Maxwell Anderson | Amazon | YouTube

“The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.”

“The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor. The point of being an artist is that you may live.”

~ Sherwood Anderson | Amazon | Winesburg, Ohio:audio

“Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.”

“A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.”

~ Guillaume Apollinaire | Amazon | YouTube

“No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.”

~ Antonin Artaud | Amazon | YouTube

“Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.” “An interview with James Baldwin” (1961), in Conversations with James Baldwin, p. 21

~ James Bladwin | Amazon | YouTube

“The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure - if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.”

~ Ethel Barrymore | NYL Digital Collection | YouTube

“Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.”

~ Jacques Barzun | Amazon | YouTube

“Art is an attempt to integrate evil.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir | Amazon | YouTube

“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”

~ Samuel Beckett | Amazon | YouTube

“What is art but a way of seeing?”

“Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.”

~ Saul Bellow | Amazon | YouTube

“Cease to be a drudge, seek to be an artist.”

~ Mary McLeod Bethune | Amazon | YouTube

“Music is part of us, and either ennobles or degrades our behavior.”

~ Boethius | Amazon | YouTube

“Architecture is inhabited sculpture.” ~ Constantine Brâncuși | Amazon | YouTube

“Art is the perfection of nature.” Religio Medici (1643)

~ Sir Thomas Browne | Project Gutenberg | YouTube

“I think best in wire.” ~ Alexander Calder | Amazon | YouTube

“Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.” Reflections on the Art of Living

~ Joseph Campbell | Amazon | YouTube

“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.”

~ Truman Capote | Amazon | YouTube

“And art puts us, I believe, in a state of grace in which we experience a universal emotion in an, as it were, religious but in the same time perfectly natural way. General harmony, such as we find in colour, is located all around us.” p. 151, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

~ Paul Cezanne | Amazon | YouTube

“The great artist takes what he needs.” - The Hero as Artist, TV series “Civilization”

“... The great religious art of the world is deeply involved with the female principle.”

~ Kenneth Clark | Civilization - YouTube |

“Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.”

“Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.”

“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.”

~ Jean Cocteau | Amazon | YouTube

“The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” Biographia Literaria (1817) Ch. XII

Samuel Taylor Coleridge | YouTube | Project Gutenberg

“Music hath charms to soothe a savage beast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.”

~ William Congreve | Amazon | YouTube | Project Gutenberg

“All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind, pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality.” Henry James - An Appreciation (1905)

~ Joseph Conrad | Amazon | YouTube

“We want a vernacular in art. No mere verbal or formal agreement, or dead level of uniformity but that comprehensive and harmonizing unity with individual variety which can be developed among people politically and socially free.”

“The basis of all art ... might be described as different kinds of drawing. Each artistic craft ... is a method of drawing, each is actually based on a drawing as a preliminary stage of its existence.”

~ Walter Crane | Amazon | YouTube - Crane's Illustration of Aesop Fables