What Is a Muse to an Artist?

I have always wondered.
Actually, I have wondered more times than I’d like to admit.
What is a muse to an artist?
A person? A memory? A feeling?

As an artist it is quite hard to explain, but somehow it finds it’s way in everything I create.
For the longest time I thought that the muse is someone beautiful; someone that made your world feel interesting.
But it seems I was quite right and quite wrong.

Muse is a term as sad as it is happy. It is something that breaks you.
Had I needed to personify a muse, I would have said it is a person who walked in your life that brought a change in you, who also walked away before that change could bloom.

But even after walking away, they stay.
They stay in the art you make.
They stay in the songs you sing.
They stay in the places you avoid.
For me? They stay in every photograph I ever captured and never deleted.

I find it strange, because I always used to thing a muse inspires you to create something. But the more I grow, I have realized that muse isn’t someone that inspires you, rather a muse is someone who leaves something that stays in your eyes regardless of if you want it or not. And what is even more strange? You spend years to understand what it is.

I find it fascinating that people say artists create their art from nothing; from a blank canvas.
But it’s rarely true. We don’t create from nothing.
Rather, we collect.
We collect faces, conversations, silences, heartbreaks, films, music, architecture, streets and what not?
We take all these from the world and turn them into something that belongs to us. The art that was never meant to talk to the world but rather to oneself.

I think that is exactly what art has taught me till now.
It taught me that everything has a story.
A photograph is never just a photograph.
A song is never just a song.
And sometimes, a person is never just a person.

Personally, I have always been someone who feels a little too deeply.
So whenever I like something, I don’t just like it, I obsess over it.
I turn every moments into stories. And stories are difficult to bury.
And all the stories about my muse have created one book. A book which I can never bury. The torment that book carries is paralyzing. And yet, that is what my art yearns.

Maybe that is what an artist does.
They don’t bury it but rather they transform.
And maybe that is what a muse is.
Or is it?

What do you think a muse is to an artist?

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This post was previously published on medium.com.