If the answer to any of these questions is yes and you then wrote about it, took a photograph or painted a picture, made up a song, a dirty limerick, or even the perfect FaceBook quip or Pinterest post, then I think you’ve experienced art imitating life. Oscar Wilde famously said: “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” This may seem chicken and eggish in the premise it sets out to prove, and to some extent it is, but I believe the distinction merits a look.
I
make a lot of stuff up when I write. Gallery photographers use
different lenses to generate and saturate color, to shadow and show
effect. Painters experiment with light and shading. Musicians and poets
play with meter and rhyme. What they and I can’t make up, and I believe
this to be true of others as well, is the emotional content. Artists of
every stripe, even mimes and sidewalk shell-game artists, have to draw
on and connect with emotion, or their art falls flat.I used my grandmother’s name in the second book I wrote for a character who otherwise was a compilation of women I admired as well as the product of my imagination. When it came time for that character to die, the emotion was very real. That scene rings true. I cry every time I read it because I let a piece of my life bleed into my art. The character wasn’t real, not wholly anyway. The emotion was.
That
same story has part of its genesis in a visit I made to a long term
care and rehabilitation facility. My client, an elderly woman with no
family and a large estate, was recovering from a hip injury. She was
also being billed $6,000 a month to share a room and drink Ensure. She
didn’t even have a walker that worked. Needless to say, I was a little
pissed off. I got her out of there, but not before she was billed
$12,000 for a 60 day stay. That little adventure spurred the creation
of Potter’s Woods, a wholistic healthcare facility. I made it up. I
created a way to pay for it in my story – it helps to have a spare
billionaire – and I felt better. Now, Mr. Wilde will be right if said
billionaire reads my story and Potter’s Woods becomes a reality.I can only hope.
My point is that artists, paid, unpaid, known and unknown, universally pour their life experience and the emotion that imbeds itself on the psyche as a result, into their art, even if all that comes out on the canvas is the representation of a soup can. It resonates with some people. It leaves others cold. Yet, the emotion is real whether it paints a rich and textured picture or it wounds with its starkness.
That’s life, baby. And it creates art.So, my friends, does life’s emotion influence the way you create or the way you enjoy art? I bring my own experience to my reading and often I read a great story a little differently than friends who read the same words. How does your life experience influence your reading, your art, your enjoyment of others' art? I can’t wait to hear from you.
My your life always be filled with art that adds to it and emotion that nurtures it.
Leigh Morgan
http://bardintraining.com/
http://www.facebook.com/leigh.morgan.5817
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