Why We Share our Art*

For the past week I have been busily - sometimes merrily and sometimes choppily - working on painting commissions, and it got me to thinking about why we share our art*. 

Why do we spend days and weeks in a studio with our brushes and our paints and then hang the finished pieces on a beautifully blank white wall for others to see; why do we put our words to pages that will live briefly on shelves in a bookstore, waiting to be taken to a new home, or be read aloud to a room full of people; why do we get up on stage and sing/play a song or 10 that we have written, to a room full of people, some friends and some strangers; why do we spend hours behind a lens and then publish/show the photographs we have taken? I could come up with a bunch more illustrations, but I think we all get the idea here...

Why are we compelled to create and then share our art?  A simple question, but I would imagine there are a multitude of reasons. These are some of the reasons that I came up with today:

• To share something of ourselves - our ideas, our dreams, our vision, our deepest thoughts, our humanity
• To communicate 
• To connect 
• To make our world a little broader, a little wider, a little deeper
• To tell each other who we are 
• To share a moment in time   

So, for me, creating art* is like a conversation. A conversation with an awesomely charming and wonderful friend. A conversation about life, and the world, our places in the world, the dreams we have for our lives, the dreams we dreamed last week, a fragment of poetry remembered, some laughter, stories about childhood, and on and on and on - one of those conversations that goes on all night, punctuated with moments of silence, gazing at the night sky, and then back to the conversation. 

What are the conversations you see in your own artwork? I would truly like to know. . . 

*The word Art is used here in a general way to describe anything that one creates in any medium of choice.