I went to the park to sketch the other day. It was a whim. I wasn’t planning it, but the moment arose and I grabbed onto it.
I got there, set up, and pulled my collection of pens from my bag.
All but one pen was dry.
And the only pen that was not dry was a thick, green-inked brush pen.
Let me add to this tale of artistic frustration that my pen of choice is usually a black ink fine-liner. This is pretty much the opposite of that is a clunky green ink shading pen—a pen that I really only brought along because I thought I might get bold enough to add a splash of colour to my spring-inspired sketch, whatever that might have been.
Yet there I was, sitting in the park having added a few lines of black to the page before the blank ink fully failed and, well, I needed to finish the sketch.
Art, I truly believe, is as much story as it is product. The best art, the best photos, the best music, and the best anything is threaded through with an artistic narrative that gives it meaning beyond the final product. Polishing a perfect piece of art that has no story behind it may work for adding commercial value, but artistic value?
Less so. Arguably.
Admittedly, the story of my dried up pen collection is not the best story, and my minor inconvenience is hardly a tale of hardship worthy of the ages… but the story of why I now have a clunky sketch made with a green-hued felt brush in my sketchbook is arguably better than the sketch itself.
That alone is worth it.
Terms FROm this POSt
- value
- I use this word a lot on this site but I’m not always referring to cash money. There are many ways to find value in something: emotional, nostalgia, spiritual, environmental, social, and countless other personally meaningful ways. I do find the assumption that everything always comes down to coins in the pocket, but that might just be being disappointed with spending fifty years watching the capitalism struggle to deliver on anything meaningfully human.
