The Artist's Dishonesty

All artists and poets do is represent the ordinary in a different light, through a different perspective or lens; as something extraordinary by blithely plucking it out of context; and in all this we are dishonest.

 A man gifted with the brush can paint alive an apple seemingly under more pressure than poor Atlas as he endeavors to hold up the heavens, the celestial sphere. Another gifted with words would make of a cup of tea something of such beauty as to rival Aphrodite herself or of the act of travelling to work such a an ordeal as to challenge even the most celebrated epics. Yet are these objects and acts all that we portray them to be? We would like to think so, yes, yet it does not mean that they are so.

Some things can be worthy of such praise and oft these talents do unlock and reveal new interpretations of life, useful or truly moving ones; as in a fallen leaf one can see a microcosm of death, hope, and a sort of rebirth- the cycle of life, while in an abandoned toy by a dusty old veranda one may be brought back to the nostalgic past and made to remember all given up in the haste to grow up and then abandoned leaving one foundation-less, lost and wondering where innocence went and why it won't return.

Yet not all things are so, and yet armed with my words and my camera I do often paint them to be more than they are, create, at least in my head, epics and tragedies revolving around mere twigs or iron bars, bent old beams and mannequins, and even mundane events like a class in college to a hour long wait.

And in this, I am dishonest.

NOTE: That I use 'we' as though I were one myself may seem presumptuous to many, yet we all are artists, some of words, some with paint, some use light and some music; while others are of sports, or of legalese and logic, and even of skin and blood. The only difference is that in many the artist but slumbers, or is made to, and thus seems non-existent while mine only half slumbers, and walks about in my head, in a semi-aware daze.