Now, let me define as best I can, what I mean by “art” and “the artist,” for the title is too often used by Post Modern intellectuals who masquerade as artists. To me an artist is someone who is on a personal quest to understand something about the world around them, while at the same time discovering something about themselves. It’s a personal voyage. They usually do this through the practice of some form of image-making, performance, prose, or construction . . .  some activity that reflects the inner world.  This activity is what we do . . . we are a photographer, a painter, a musician, a dancer, a playwrite or novelist. It’s up to society to tell us if we are artists. If the work we do is deep enough, if it touches a well of shared humanity, that universal quality of human existance, if the work is inspired and touches others, then perhaps it is art, and the creator is an artist. But I like what Elizabeth Gilbert said during a recent TED lecture . . . Show up, do your work, and if you are busy with the work, perhaps the “genius” the Muse will visit and inspire the work. The painter Neil Weliver, who lived just up the road from me here in Maine, told me . . . “do your work, every day. Do not want for inspiration. There’s a better chance inspiration will come if you are working.”

John Gardner, the novelist, puts it this way:

"What a writer needs most," said John Gardener in his book On Becoming a Novelist "is an almost demonic compulsiveness. No novelist is hurt (at least not as an artist) by a natural inclination to go to extremes, driving himself too hard, dissatisfied with himself and the world around him and driven to improve on both if he can. A psychological wound is helpful, if it can be kept in partial control.

    "Some childhood accident for which one feels responsible ... a sense that one never quite earned one's parents' love; shame about one's origins; belligerent, defensive guilt about one's race or upbringing . . . are all good signs."

The demonic-ness that Gardner speaks of is the divine, or the devil, that can consume us with a mission . . . the compulsiveness means we will do this thing, what ever it is, regardless of consequences, or even getting paid. The desire to improve the world is laudable, but is often overshadowed by the artists attempt to discover something about themselves. Paul Caponigro, the landscape photographer, told me: “You don’t make art . . . art makes you.” Meaning, I gather, that in your attempt to do something that is outside ourself, embarking on an adventure, facing your own demons, you came to a better understanding of who you are and of what you are capable. Going to an Ashram is also searching for the divine within, but instead of silent meditation, this art-making process is an active search for self in the work we do. The work becomes the mirror of the soul, that for what we seek . . . the inner God.

    Ernest Haas, a photographer and one of my mentors, spoke of artists, not as craftspeople, but as searchers, explorers, seekers. The artist’s journey, akin to Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey” is inward as much as external, the external being the mirror for the internal search. Any America-made film worth it’s Oscar, contains those elements. As we share the hero’s fight to subdue the evil doer, we also watch our Hero wrestling with the internal conflicts of self-doubt, guilt, addition, laziness . . . the list goes on. “The Line of Fire,” the Clint Eastwood film about a Secret Service Agent who has to protect the President, we watch the Agent confronting his guilt at failure to protect a former President (Kennedy) from the fatal bullet that killed him. Its the agent’s job to put himself “in the line of fire,” to take the assassin's bullet meant for the President. We watch Eastwood, an aging agent, deal with his ego, guilt, age, stubbornness, arrogance perhaps, and in the end he dispatches the present day assassin and wins the girl. You don’t get that good feeling, of a “conclusion” in European fllms. Nothing is resolved in a French film. In an American film, you leave the theater with a sense of hope in your own heart. You have just watch some mythical hero go through their test of fire, and come out a winner, so you

too (hopefully) are now better prepared to face your own demons. These films and novels, the stories I share, have helped me deal with my setbacks, depression, heart break, loss of a loved ones, confronting hurricanes and blizzards. “This too will pass . .  .” I hear myself saying. One foor in front of the other and I’ll get there . . .

David H. Lyman

Rockport Maine

Winter 2009