“Life is Short, Art is Long.”
By: Ravneet Bawa
Tags: Artist, Life Lessons, Art, Learning, Reflections

Photo by Delia Giandeini on Unsplash

This has been a creatively fulfilling year as a result of all the time I had and all the conflict on my mind. The two vital ingredients for making art — a sense of unease and the relieving of daily duties. I am not just referring to writing — I have written lesser but better in previous years and this hasn’t yet been the year where I feel satisfied with my output, but this has definitely been an year where I feel satisfied with the process. Between Inktober, the singing lessons and the writing, there’s been plenty of contemplation on the nature of art itself. We are reductive in assuming art is all about appreciating and cultivating creativity. We evangelize the life skills one learns from playing sports but we almost never talk about the personal place of refuge one builds by pursuing art. One that buffers you, but also allows you expression when words don’t make sense. I have found that often when it has been hard to articulate emotion, art has provided limitless escape. And while creating is beautiful, even consuming art has been so wholesome.

My explorations with art this year were quite revealing:

Your hands hurt when you art a lot without a break (it’s painful)

Inspiration is a friend on pot; it will appear profound and clear one day, it will be so tipsy you want to punch it another

By the end of the Inktober month, I was physically spent — I was itching to throw away the iPad and the pencil, to never look at another comic

I have the greatest, immensest amount of respect for artists and their work. Please buy if you like something, and you can afford it.

Putting yourself out there, day after day, knowing well that some days your work is embarrassingly inadequate — that is courage. Nearly none of us have it. Courage is standing up for yourself, your work, everyday, believing it is worth something when absolutely no one else does

I learnt focus, and flow — it is beautiful to have a note to perfect. It is a tiny tiny task in the scheme of the universe but it is so beautiful in the doing, like what sex should be

I recognised yet again the joy of learning from one who loves both the subject and the teaching; my music teacher is a such a joy, he will play the synth as he waits for the class to settle and begin, all the while filling our home with the energy of live music, like what religion should be

And finally, in compiling my anthology I travelled back in time 15 years, to my early days in Bangalore, all spent on my blog then, and it took only a line in some verse for me to recreate the exact emotion I was feeling when I wrote that poem; Memory does not work like that but art does

Earlier this year, I wrote somewhere on Instagram about the near visceral reaction I had when I first saw the sculpture of David, in Accademia gallery in Florence. I was at once struck by the beauty of the final piece, but also the unyielding effort Michelangelo put into a slab of marble, making it come alive and moving people five hundred years hence. There must be a certain universality to humanity that persists across time and location. For where technology has become increasingly divisive, art abstracts that which is common and relays it back to us, telling us — You are not alone.

[The title of this post is also a quote from Seneca’s essay, the one you sampled in my last post.]