Saturday, July 23, 2011

30 days: artist vs. technician

If I may greatly over-generalize for a moment. There are technicians, and then, there are artists. Neither is superior to the other, but their natural capabilities and methods for consuming their environments (and producing) are vastly different.

You can count on a technician to behave more consistently than you can an artist. It would be in err to give a technician something and expect to get something vastly greater in return. It would also be in err to expect anything in return from an artist; however, there is the possibility that what an artist does produce is nothing short of incredible: boundary re-defining.

The true artist's ongoing pursuit of the finest, of true beauty, often leaves them feeling lacking and confused: if they do not have, or have to their expectations, there is something missing. And like any true artist, the expectations are always growing, always growing. In a way it's sort of an unattainable path, like the rabbit in front of the derby horse. But it's that melancholy that makes life feel "alive".

Some people do not question their existence in the same way, and thusly don't need such melancholy to feel secure or normalized; they only find it a bother. I think this is a more practical train of thought.

Is it so simple that we can all be broken into these two categories? Or in various ways are we simultaneously both? Is it possible to break sides and move from one to the other, or, are we hopelessly at the whim of God?

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