Expressing Yourself Through Art: The Dichotomy of Authenticity and Artistry

Art often serves as a powerful medium for personal expression and emotional communication. While some artists seek to convey their own feelings through their work, others use art to explore and interpret the feelings of their characters or subjects. This article delves into these nuanced approaches to art expression, comparing the experiences of an artist who creates to resonate with others versus a stage actor who enacts consistent characters.

Art as Personal Expression

For many artists, the process of creating art is deeply personal. Their work aims to express a wide range of emotions, from joy and love to sorrow and anger. Artists such as the author mentioned emphasize the importance of creating pieces that are meaningful to them, with the hope that these works will resonate with others. Through different mediums and styles, they keep their work fresh and interesting, aiming to touch the hearts and minds of their audience.

Stage Acting: A Role Beyond Emotion

Artistic expression extends beyond the canvas or the canvas to the stage. For the author’s own experience, acting is not about expressing one’s own feelings but about embodying a character. With over 40 years of experience, the author dedicates themselves to the task of portraying a character whose consistency aligns with the play and the understanding of the author and the director. This often involves physicalizing the character’s internal life through body posture, movement, voice, and other mannerisms to ensure the audience can relate and understand the character’s emotions.

The Intersection of Authenticity and Artistry

The dichotomy between expressing personal feelings and creating a character-controlled narrative can be challenging. In the case of the author, a deep personal loss acted as a catalyst for artistic creation. When their friend Eric Cullen died, the author chose to write a poem to reflect on his life and death. Professor Barrett's insightful question during her bereavement counseling course—“Did you write the poem to express what you felt about Eric’s death, or did you use Eric’s death to write the poem?”—highlights the complexity of this artistic decision. The author admits that their poem was a way to use Eric’s death to create something beautiful and meaningful.

Edward Marriot’s observation from "Scotland on Sunday" further underscores the notion that intense experiences can serve as a rich source of inspiration for art. The ‘splinter of ice’ analogy suggests that even the most brutal experiences can yield powerful and meaningful works of art. This reality highlights the duality of the artist’s role: they must find a balance between tapping into their own emotions and creating work that is grounded in a character’s or subject’s experiences.

Conclusion

Whether artists express their own feelings or the feelings of characters, both approaches have value. The former can lead to deeply personal and resonant works, while the latter ensures that the narrative serves a story consistently and authentically. The challenge lies in finding the right balance between personal authenticity and narrative coherence. Ultimately, both forms of artistic expression enrich the human experience, offering windows into the depths of the human soul and the complexity of the human condition.