In one sense art is a selfish endeavour. I’ve spent hours alone at night honing my craft on some piece. Be it finding the right chord progression, the right pixels or the right word. I rarely conceive of having an ‘audience’ it is an activity for its own sake , for self gratification.
Secretly you dream of being recognized, having that album pressed, that photograph printed, the novel published. Until such time, you pour yourself into this activity and send it freely into the digital ether hoping it bumps into someone and each time it does your heart swells with hope. All that we search for is a little recognition! If it were not for the feedback I get on my music at MakeTunes, my heart may have been broken by the vast silence and self-doubt some time ago.
So it was with delight that I recently discovered a blog dedicated to Black & White photography (www.ablogwithblackandwhitepics.com) had featured a portrait of mine, Serious. I discovered Bless’s work after she left a comment on the Random Ambient Collaboration, which itself is someone else’s project that I’m helping to promote.
I was immediately struck by the delicacy of the details in her sketches. The human face is inherently interesting. The software loaded into our brains to map out the nearly inscrutable and subtle details of faces in order to distinguish them from one another is immense. Then to my utter surprise I received a comment informing me that Bless has created a sketch based on my serious photograph:
Please check it out, as well as her other works.
To receive some recognition or even praise is heartening, but to be a source of inspiration is very flattering and it made my day.
A simple truth that is so easily overlooked by people who are self-consumed, or consumed by the problems of their ’self’ is the power each of us holds within ourselves. The power to brighten a person’s very spirit with a few kind words, a well placed smile, a comment on a blog somewhere wishing a struggling artist some encouragement. The digital ether of the internet can be a vast and lonesome landscape and yet people from different sides of the earth can bump into one another like primeval atoms and then, magic happens.
Illusive, thank you so much for your words about my work. My heart is full of hope.
Bless :]