Apres Planet Christmas 2025 Edition - Flipbook - Page 27
YESTERDAY’S NEWS TOMORROW
VIVE
L’INTENTION
A
house painter may master his brush,
but mastery alone does not make art.
A welder may shape metal with precision,
but without artistic intent, he is no sculptor.
Art does not lie in the function,
but in the intention behind the act.
Creation becomes art when it carries
meaning beyond its use. When it invites us to
look again not just at the object, but it’s intent.
Take Christo, the Bulgarian-born conceptual artist.
He wrapped landmarks in fabric. Ran cloth across valleys
and coastlines. Not your average day out for a seamstress?
He shattered the idea that materials are subordinate,
elevating them to something near divine. That was art, not
in what he used, but in how he made us see it.
Earth art gives us another lens. Using natural materials in
ways they were never meant to behave.
Stones in spirals. Soil shaped like sculpture. Leaves
creating geomtric patterns in decending hues. It interrupts
our assumptions. It takes the functional and makes it
aesthetic. Suddenly, the ordinary becomes provocative.
Mastery of material alone doesn’t make you an artist. It
might make you a brilliant craftsperson but not an artist.
“What is art then?” I hear you cry.
Art is many things and incredibly subjective to the viewers
own life experiences. I won’t attempt to flatten it with a
definition. But I’ll offer this: Art is a way of seeing and a
way of making others see. A way of moving the familiar
into the unfamiliar, of jolting perception. It lives in
intention and is revealed in risk, in play, in curiosity. in
failure. in rebellion.
So forget whether it’s oil vs. acrylic, canvas or digital. It
doesn’t matter. The medium doesn’t crown the art. The
intention does. But beware; if that intention is buried
under layers of pseudo-meaning and over-explanation,
maybe that artist is just mining fool’s gold.
So, when you next stand before something claiming
to be Art-with-a-capital-A, ask yourself: Where is the
subversion? Where is the tension? Where is the new? If
it’s not there, move on, because your artist is out there.
Someone, somewhere, is fighting normalcy on your behalf.
Go find them. Don’t let their work be in vain.
26
