What is Art?

My mother is an artist. Her medium is cloth and her tools are pins and scissors, needles and thread and heart.

My husband works in metal. Wheels and wrenches, wires, pliers, manuals and heart.

One of our daughters uses paint and canvas, brushes, pastels, oils and heart.

Our other daughter is a writer. She uses words, images, plot lines and character and heart. Both have turned parenting into an art-form. Here, their medium is patience, persistence, guidance, discipline… and heart.

I have seen teachers create learning with papier-mâché and paint. Nurses who create health with medicine and education. Policemen, fireman and grocers who work in the medium of service and human kindness to create community.

In all of these people and vocations, creativity begins in the heart and the results personify beauty.

Forget about the museum and the gallery – humanity’s truest interpretation of itself is created when its members choose love and joy and peace to create connection. Paintings, sculptures, music, books and all the other things we typically classify as “art” are simply varying expressions of our view of the world already created by community. Sometimes these expressions are beautiful. Sometimes they are ugly, but always they are a commentary on who we are.  Those who create relationship with kindness and compassion are no less artists than those who paint or sing or dance.

Never mind the medium in which it is created, true art is only a reflection of the truth that lies within us. What truth are you displaying in your art, and how do you create it?