noah’s Reviews > The Artist's Journey: On Making Art & Being an Artist > Status Update

and as someone whose understanding of life has been shaped by random encounters and small epiphanies, how do i properly acknowledge [...] the professor who counselled the twitching, tortured graduate student to have the courage to leave the confines of academia because he himself had always wanted to be a concert pianist and had spent his life wondering how good he might have been?

feelings come to us - honest feelings, human
feelings, feelings that do not fit inside our square-
cornered life. we want to cry out - from joy, from terror, from grief, from some emotion that wells up and overwhelms us - and we are, for a moment, in a place that has no shape and no edges [...]. this is when we turn to art, because art can give shape to that moment.

this is what a work of art can do. it can make you feel like it sees, like it understands you, like it speaks directly to you and your experience. it pierces the fragile shell of the self, and you feel that on some fundamental level not only do you know that but that work knows you; it comes from a place where your spirit is congruent with the spirit of its creator.

i began to breathe ideas rather than think them. thoughts flowed out of me with an ease and grace that had been eluding me for days. i was inside the music and the music was inside me. it was at once a filling and an emptying, a cleansing and an inspiring. by opening my heart the music clarified my mind. this is what music does to me. (...) music for me has always been the mother art.

when you are playing with someone who really has something to say, even though they may be otherwise quite different in style, there's one thing that remains constant. and that is the tension of the experience, that electricity, that kind of feeling that is a lift sort of feeling - john coltrane

you feel distracted, almost disengaged. you have no focus, your mind begins to wander. other artistic projects begin to creep into your thoughts. the work you once wore like a second skin seems somehow distant and uninvolving. you have come to one of the artist's most feared moments: you are done but the work is not finished.

having said all this, knowing when to make the decision remains a leap of faith. but make it your must, because if you fail to make it, you either labour your work to death or never finish anything. neither is a worthy outcome for all the effort you have put into your art.