Happy Valentines Day?

Hello Fellow Deviants!
Seems it's s day and I have a mouth full to say about that special(?) part of us. You know the one - your life depends on it. Art and creativity depend on it. If your heart isn't in your art it's just scribble and paint on paper, nothing more than that. Something to fill an empty space with more emptiness. We show our true selves in our art whether we know it or not. Our deepest desires and fears come out in our art even though our own eyes are often blind to it. If an artist is in love, the art will show it. If only one brush stroke it will be the color and vibration of that emotion behind it. Anger looks through hard slashes of pen and brush. Love is the softer touch ups and vivid hues. Brokenness, pain, and suffering often comes out in grays and blacks with not much thought or care. WHO you are will show through like you are living in a glass house.

There is not one artist among us who does not live in a glass house when we decide to pick up our canvases, sketch pads, cameras, or open up our art software on our computers. No matter what art-form what you wish to hide comes out in shadow. Shadow enhances the light in the subject we are working on. It is our heart-form that is the reality of our art-form. Have you noticed that you think of one or only a few particular people, places, or emotions, memories all that are constant in any mood, in any subject you work with? It is the parts of us that we love most that plagues and enhances the brain as we chose to create in that moment. There is a constant, always there with us just as our physical hearts beat. Our heartbeat moves each touch, gives each motion momentum as we go about our work so often not consciously thinking of that constant that is ever present. If you want to truly know yourself and your art, ask yourself what is that constant for you? Is it a person? A memory? Just a "feeling" you can't quite pin down? For me it was a person. Every painting I have done, every blackout poem I have published - even the novels I work on in private that will not be published here - that one single person was always in those thoughts like clockwork they would come out and be right there each time I began to create.

Today is the day of the year when we are sometimes painfully aware of that constant that drives us ever more to create. If you have been blessed with abundance in your life that abundance will only be magnified today as a crucial part of our souls reach out and find that constant in us - that "breath of life" to our heart (he-ART), yes our art. It is no coincidence or mishap the spellings of our written language. If we have suffered loss or mostly pain we will be ever more aware of it today than most other days of the year. What the he(ART) feels is ultimately what we create. We cannot escape those boundaries. Our life, our death - it is all in our he(ART)s.

Our he(ART)s are our most vulnerable and fragile pieces. It is only natural to feel we must protect them at all costs. Many a good drama and crime novels, movies, stories and such have been and can be written about obsessions with art or a specific piece of art that drove the artist or connoisseur to madness with wanting to touch, hold, to OWN it forever or to never allow other hands or eyes to touch it. Some of the most vicious criminals have been created though this burning desire. A yearning for what that one work brings out in the beholder - an invaluable part of the soul, the he(ART) that can never be replicated even by the same artist, not an exact which is what that soul reaching for what cannot be held yet shown in the art and that is the only thing that will slake the lust of the heart that is seeking.

This brings us right back to that one constant that drives us. Our soul-mate, if you want to call it that. The meaning fits well enough. You don't have to "find" your constant. It is already there awaiting you. Embrace it. Create it over and over and over again. Allow the bliss to lift you to those heights time and time again.

May your constant always be constant.

Happy he(ART)s s Day!

~VelvetWaters744