Art, Love and Everything Else

Ever wondered, how on a bad day, just watching leaves rustle or rain drops create puddles, or even just a butterfly land softly on a flower, with tiny dew drops, inspires such gratitude in your heart, while being the most mundane of things to exist?

Soft breeze somehow always lifts my mood on a dull day. I see trees, as majestic as they are, after a rain, filling the space around with the freshest shade of green, complementing flowers and birds and everything else around. Somewhere sitting beside the window, some soul that appreciates this beauty, tries to put it on a canvas, with wet strokes and creates what we call art.

But legends have accepted that we haven’t invented art. This of course came as a surprise to me, an artist myself, as one naturally believes someone someday lifted a brush or a stone and scraped something and art was born. But this is far from reality. J F Martel, a writer on art, culture, and philosophy, talks about Lascaux caves, and how four boys discovered beautiful, perfectly carved “art” on limestone walls, while originally in search of jewels, and how further research led to discovery of paintings and drawings on cave walls dating to twice the age of the Lascaux murals, which today are believed to be around 20,000 years old.

He also goes on to state that according to a popular legend, when Pablo Picasso went to the Lascaux caves after the discovery of the murals, he came out with the humble exclamation — ”We invented nothing” — which points towards the greater truth — we didn’t invent art. Rather, its the other way around.

Art invented humanity.

And it invented love, passion, direction, royalty, and everything around us as we walk, live and breathe.

Pain finds its way out of our hearts, through art. When in pain, a poet pens down songs and a thousand other souls find solace in those words. An artist expresses grief through a blend of colors, and a thousand eyes interpret that grief in their own way, and embrace it like an invisible warm hug. We feel fondness towards a voice which can sing and stitch words into music, and that makes me realize how profound the impact of art is on the human mind, heart and soul.

There is another puzzling question that arises here — art is often associated with beauty, and to a modern mind, beauty and truth is as far from synonymous as it can get, considering how frequently it deceives us. But when John Keats completed ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, it opened gates to looking and perceiving beauty synonymously with truth. Especially the words:

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Art has never been a celebration of humanity, but always an exploration of those borderlands where the human ends and something else begins. Art is useful only if it is allowed to remain entirely useless — that is, entirely free to go where it will.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.