Art is the most essential part of life. It brings people together through interpretations of emotions, colors, or reflections of oneself. Art allows us to take all the emotions, feelings and thoughts we have that we can’t express and put them into something beautiful that connects others.
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This begins in childhood when we are asked to draw a family portrait and share a piece of our lives with others, or simply draw a tree. Although drawing a tree doesn’t necessarily evoke deep emotions, it creates a baseline for the discovery of ourselves that is yet to come. One could even say a museum of art is more euphoric than a church. At a museum we are allowed to completely immerse ourselves in culture and expose experiences and feelings we might not have even known we had.
Art is freeing: you allow yourself to let go and relate to someone you may not even know. As humans, we can get very consumed in our own lives. However, we forget that not all experiences are unique to ourselves, and so much of life is about sharing those experiences. We can talk about them and heal from them in order to discover ourselves and connect to each other, because human connection can be the most powerful feeling in the world. Life wasn’t meant to be lived alone; that's why humanity exists. We have to take advantage of the gift of human life and individuality. Individuality also comes into play because art is also all about interpretation. One person may look at a tree and be reminded of childhood memories, climbing up the tree or running around it in an intense game of tag. Now when I look at the tree, there is nothing different about it but my perspective is different. I may be reminded of feelings of loneliness and relate to the tree that has no ability to speak, like how I struggle to express myself verbally.
Art allows us to feel these deep sensations and passions sometimes without words. One of the most amazing things about art is that it is endless, and it takes so many different forms. A synopsis of the festival “ Art All Around Us” states, “Art is everywhere, whether you know where to look or not.” Art is in music, home-cooked meals, nature, people, paintings, poems, and conversations with the ones we love. There are good things all around us, and when we choose to focus on the positive instead of the negative, we notice the world isn’t such a bad place to be. In fact, creativity and expression are two very high points in life, chances for us to show love, loss and everything in between.
One of the world’s most famous painters, Vincent Van Gogh, once said, “Art is to console those who are broken by life.” Life is the most difficult and complex thing imaginable, but just because things hurt us doesn’t mean we are done; there is support and encouragement in everything, like art. Art is a form of therapy – it takes every single feeling and thought and can be used as an outlet, creating a form of therapy for people the creator may not even know.
