I’ve been thinking about why people make art. Mostly because I am questioning why I make art. I stopped painting for about 10 months – the longest I’ve ever gone without painting. Before my hiatus from painting, I made art for different reasons. In elementary school, I liked to draw because it was fun. In middle and high school, I worked on my observational drawing skills and I began to make art that represented the world. Art became a way for me to observe a scene or object and translate it into a two-dimensional space. At the end of high school and throughout college, art became a way for me to express myself. I’ve always been introverted and quiet, and art became a way for me to put myself on a canvas, to display all the emotions, thoughts, and feelings I couldn’t express out loud. Creating art was a therapeutic release for me – when I was sad or lonely, I went to the painting studio where the familiar smell of oil paint made me feel at home. Painting was my home.

My freshman year of college I was very homesick and I began to paint the ocean. The ocean is peaceful, calming, cool colors which made me feel at ease. Then I began to paint memories and moments, things that reminded me of home and my childhood. Painting became a way to remember who I am. To paint things that were meaningful to me.

Left – a drawing from elementary school; Right – a painting from high school

Above – works in progress from my freshman year of college

In my college studio art classes, we were often encouraged to think conceptually about art and make art with a greater purpose and intention. But we also learned about process-based art – creating something with no clear product in mind and seeing what happens with the paint or sculpture or object. Letting go of thought and letting the brush guide your hand, experimenting with marks, gestures, lines. Not having a preconceived notion of the final product. Making art without an end product in mind was intimidating at first, but as I began to experiment more with abstraction and marks, I couldn’t stop painting like this. It was freeing to let go of realism.

Above – Some paintings I made without an end-product in mind (process-based art)

While my own artistic practices have crossed between varying levels of realism and abstraction, I’ve come to rely on artmaking as a way to feel free and to express myself. I think anyone who creates anything is showing aspects of themselves in their handiwork. Even the earliest known forms of art, such as cave paintings, were perhaps a way of communicating – relaying information about animals to other humans, or simply a mark telling others, “I was here”. Other early forms of art, including small votive figurines, could have been created as offerings to gods/goddesses, symbols of fertility, or as good luck charms, though the exact purposes of these artifacts is unknown. When art intersects with craft (weaving, textiles, pottery, etc.), art has a function – it holds water or lays on the ground protecting the floor.

Left – Ardabil Carpet at the V&A Museum; Right – Pottery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

I suppose there are two avenues of artmaking – making art with a purpose and without a purpose. Art made with a purpose can be many things: communication, self-expression, commentary on the world/social issues. Art made without purpose may simply be a collection of marks, colors, experiments. And some art lies in between the purposeful and purposeless. Except even art made without a purpose, while not initially meant to have a purpose, may still be meaningful.

Does there need to be a reason? Can people make art just because they want to? Do people make art for themselves or for the world? Is it selfish to make art for yourself? Can art be created simply for the purpose of being created?

I always find it interesting to see how people look at art in museums. I feel like there’s 3 different types of museum-goers:

1. The Caption Reader – spends more time reading the caption than looking at the artwork
2. The Photographer – rushes through the entire museum, snapshotting as many works of art as possible; also the Instagram photographers, posing in front of famous works of art, ready to share it on their feed
3. The Absorber – sits/stands in front of a work of art, staring at it for a long time

I’ve fallen into all of these categories. I have so many photographs of artwork at museums, and I never look at them, I don’t know why it’s so important for me to photograph a work of art. I guess it’s just a memory, like any photograph.

And while captions are important, I realized that I was spending more time reading the caption than looking at the artwork. It’s comical how the caption almost becomes another work of art on the wall, ready to be taken in by museum visitors. Would the artist want people to read the caption, or would they prefer people look at the art? I suppose both are important, context is important when looking at art, but I wonder sometimes if reading too much into the context of the artwork takes away from what is on the canvas.

After learning in one of my art classes that the average person only spends a few seconds looking at each work of art in a museum, I decided I would challenge myself and sit in front of an artwork for at least five minutes. It’s peaceful and slow, like watching rain fall, taking note of swirls of brushstrokes, colors meshing together, thinking about who the artist was, how they felt when they created the artwork.

It makes me think about how long it takes me to create art, and how much time the artist must have spent creating their artwork. Although maybe it doesn’t matter how long people look at the art. Musicians spend hours, days, months, years crafting the perfect songs and lyrics. And when it’s finished, there’s only 3 minutes of a song that people listen to and move on with the rest of their day. Do you have to sit with something for a while to appreciate it, or can you still appreciate art after only seeing it for a short time?

Regardless of whether or not time spent consuming art relates to level of appreciation, my favorite artwork to sit and stare at is Jennifer Bartlett’s 24 Hours at the Met. I first saw Bartlett’s 3 large paintings my junior year of high school, when my art class took a five hour bus trip to New York City. The clocks in each painting piqued my curiosity. Later, in college, I went to the Met many times, and I would always skip past all the Renaissance works until I made it to the modern art section, where I would sit and stare at the 3 large Bartlett paintings on the wall. When I was homesick and alone, I went to these paintings to find comfort. They were familiar.

Maybe art is about portraying the human experience. Maybe art is about finding connection, communicating what can’t be said in words.

What do people think when they see artwork? I guess if I’ve learned anything from the countless art critiques I had in college, everyone looks at art differently and everyone gets something different out of artwork. And the artist’s intention when creating the artwork is not always evident to the viewer. Do artists make art for themselves, or with an audience in mind?