Have you ever watched an artist paint? Or draw? Watched them look at their subject, watched them dab a color, pencil a line, take something that seems usual, elementary, unexciting, and make it divine? What is it with artists, why do they do what they do, and why is there not an artist in you?
For a long time, I imagined artists were just wanderers, or people who had talent, or people who somehow saw what others did not, or had a God-given ability to transform stuff, colorful blobs into shapes, like water into ice, ice into steam, hay into gold, regular stuff into visual dreams.
Have you ever thought about how artists think, where they go, how they disappear into their art, mesmerized, captivated, oddly not distractable – on their face, transported to a different place?
The scene that comes to mind is Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. As Bert, a chimney sweep with a knack for pavement art, takes the wind-riding Mary Poppins and two kids on a “Jolly Holiday” sketched with chalk, dancing with penguins, riding painted horses as viewers gawk.
What is that? What did Walt Disney himself and the Sherman brothers – who wrote the accompanying song “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” – mean to convey, rounded out by Julie Andrews, as Mary Poppins, having the nerve to say – it all backward?
I think the point was simple. You have the power to do just as artists do, to wildly imagine, to see more than meets the common eye, to step directly into beauty, and wave the world goodbye.
What do I mean? What did Disney mean? What does anyone mean, especially artists, when they talk of seeing beauty, drawing it, painting, loving, vanishing into it, making time a visual rhyme?
They mean, be ready to give it all up, dispose of that jaundiced, jaded, cynical take on what we all experience, stuff that drags us down, vies for our attention, sticks to the shoe like gummy goo. Try a different approach, a new worldview; see Minnie and Mickey in mice, double sixes in dice.
What artists do that others don’t, is see beauty around them, look for it, observe it, and disappear into the wonderment of it, going through that creative door. In time, basic blobs become watercolor washes, simple strokes, and slices suddenly shooting stars and wood paths on lithographs.
For myself, drawing, painting, and cooking is hard, mixing words and counting beans easier than silk screens; the point is not how well we pencil, dab, or cook – but our readiness for a new outlook.
So, when the morning headlines and latest absurdity, some twist of facts makes you crazy, just look out the window, take a walk instead; study the fractal-like veins in a maple leaf, a spider’s delicate pentagonal web, ponder how a heron patiently awaits the sunrise, when the owl finally goes to bed.
Remember the greatest joys in life are free. They greet us every day, a secret the artist knows, which is why artists are so often happy. They see what others don’t, revel in each day’s wonder as if were their duty, smiling easily on birds and butterflies, never losing a chance to understand beauty.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
