O, God, I Need Art!

God, I am not your strongest soldier. You know, in fact, that I am one of your grunts. Meek, unsteady, shaken.

You send me strength in the form of technicolor. You steady my feet with pulsing rhythms, straighten my back with blown glass and pieces of an easel. You keep my heart beating with fantastical cinematic explosions, heart stopping horrors, and tender ministrations. You move me forward with hope and joy and anticipation. You put me on this Earth to love and do and be art, and by Your Name nobody is going to fucking stop me from fulfilling that purpose.

I need it! I need it like water, like air, like the earth needs gravity— oh, God, I need art to live. Survival is too stark, it’s too sparse and harsh a mode of living to stay in forever, we need art to live. Any art, whatever we can make. If we can do nothing else but create pictures out of dust, crush rock together to form scored lines along surfaces— then we make that art. If we can do nothing else but open a blush, uncap a pencil of kohl, and have just a dab of glitter, then we sweep lines along our eyes, lips, cheeks, create a gradient of blushing star streaks along our skin, emphasize the highlight points with that glitter. If we can do nothing but write words upon a screen, we fill the air with gentle clicks and an aggressive smack against a backspace button. If we have no screen, we write in lined notebooks. If we don’t even have that, we write upon sticky notes, or a hotel pad swiped from the drawer. If we can do not even that, we grab a pen and scrawl upon our own flesh. If we can do nothing but scream, we speak poetry aloud and let whoever feels it come closer and breathe.

So many of us crave the act of creation, the process of forming something from the infinitesimal, the blocks, the remains. We draw upon the air currents, the water flow, the tree sways, all whispering to us a gentle edict or quiet muse to inspire what gives us purpose.

Art isn’t solely an act of creation, it’s also an inhalation! It’s an act of reception, of critique, inheritance, and becoming. We do art when we turn on a show, a movie, a song. We become art when we let the appreciation move through us, change out shapes and minds and hearts. We become the swirls of paint, the delicate outline, the light, the shadow, the pressed linen, the shining leather, the feather and the curl and the sheen. We do art as we write praise or topple a pedestal so long as it is in the passion of our soul.

God, I need it, I tell you!

I need the stretched canvas blank and seductive! I need the gouache, the acrylic, the oil, the watercolor! I need globs and dollops and streaks and strokes! I need the college ruled paper with lines waiting to be filled in! I need the glitter gel pens all neatly lined up! I need the watercolor markers, permanent markers, glitter markers, dual tipped markers! I need the pencils from H to 2B to No.2! I need the needle and the thread! I need yarn, lace, cotton, and sequins! I need overworked accountants that moonlight as fanfic writers! I need the moms creating epics on AO3! I need the Wattpad writers, the Tumblerinas, the Twitter story maestros, the Notes afficionados, the bards on podcasts!

God, I tell you I need the explosions on the screen! I need the children racing across glimmering fields and the dragons that follow! I need unicorns and fairies and fashionistas going on adventures! I need the quiet dialogue, the bombastic monologue, the seething rebuttal and the pleading confessions! I need the guttural screams and the blackest eyes and the ghosts and blood and every facet of the Devil that graces the screen! I need horror and adrenaline and happiness and softness! I need the sparkling eyes and wicked grins and curved shoulders and pumping arms and quivering lips and twisting wrists and shaking hips and footwork oh I need all of it!

I can’t live without the bioluminescence skittering through the waves, the fall leaves, the fluffy clouds, the stormy sky, the raindrops on windows, the sparkling dew at sunrise, the ocean and the sky and the land and the humans and animals you put on this Earth because we are all art.

Cross posted from Substack