Touched by an Artist

For my darling wife Jeanie. Not just on Valentine's Day, but every day, I am astonished by the depth of your love for me.

What...incredible woman, could you have possibly seen in me?

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Jeanie, my wonderful, beautiful artist teaches me so many things about art and in turn, whether she knows it or not, about life.

They say that art imitates life and I never truly realized the deepest meaning of that until I fell in love with my artist.

Art--like life requires vision, patience, endurance, hope, and most of all love.

And with each piece that I am privileged to watch her skilled hands bring to life, the small, quiet truths of art's life imitations grow deeper into my soul, like the roots of a great, steady tree, aged with secret wisdom...reaching down into the virgin Terra, taking good hold, to become strong and permanent light-revealing principles.

I quietly observe the love of my life sit cross-legged on the floor...

With idea in mind, brush in hand...she slowly begins to create something precious, urging it patiently, a stroke at a time...layer by layer, slowly, carefully and faithfully, until finally, the finished work emerges, dancing from the canvas in radiant circles of light and color.

Much like I imagine that the great Artist first drafted the designs of the universe.

Though I don't imagine that the Artist makes mistakes, I would never actually know for sure, because one thing that I have learned from watching my Jeanie is that a true artist makes something beautiful from her mistakes.

So, it would stand to reason--at least in my small mind--that if in fact nature is a finished piece of artwork, perhaps the mistakes that the Artist made long ago, were transformed into beauty—the hallmark of the true artist.

Art imitates life on this respect: To be successful at life, we must learn to grasp the patience and vision of the artist.

We must learn not to react to our mistakes, but to meditate upon them.

We must learn to step back and quietly contemplate on our false strokes, until we begin to "see through" them to the beauty that lies beyond.

Eventually, if we practice diligently as the artist practices, we can begin to turn the tables on our blunders, making them instead into successes.

Loving an artist has opened my mind to new appreciations and perceptions.

For example, there abides every imaginable form of color, light and hue, sound, shadow and depth in everyday life that, astonishingly, I have not ever noticed before.

These wonderments are all around us every moment of our lives. Yet, incredibly, I have managed not to heed them.

But my artist teaches me to stop a moment, when my mind is full of my hurried, worried thoughts, and breathe in the pure, exquisiteness of the color and texture of my surroundings. Though I am new at it and not always successful, when it does work, it is as if my head empties in a gush...and I am reborn.

How is that I have lived some forty odd years on this gorgeous planet and never seemed to take notice of the delicate veins of a leaf, or the sheer genius of detail in a tiny lady bug?

How can it be that I have never seen through the artist's eyes and marveled at the perplexity and complexity of The Artist's creation?

During those truly precious moments when I am granted a feeble ability to see, I do see, and I am humbled.

During those short moments when I see, I am swept over with a sense of gratitude to perceive beyond next week's problems. I see the reality of life. I see with the heart of the artist.

Art imitates life.

Life, like art, happens in layers and I have come to understand that I can usually take a layered approach to life.

Starting with the base ideas, I can methodically build upon my thoughts and visions, substituting one thing for another in a trial an error fashion until the reality of what I want to bring forth in my life materializes and my goals are attained.

I am in no way, shape or form an artist myself, although I did take an art appreciation course in college one semester.

What I remember from that long ago class is the instructor posing a question to us on the first day. We were to provide him with a one-page answer to "What is art?"

My answer to that question then, was different to what it would be today, thanks to the artist that I love.

Back then I struggled with mundane answers to that simple question, citing something like, "art is painting, art is pottery and art is doll-making."

My answers were flat and unimaginative because at that time in my life, I was flat and unimaginative. I had no true comprehension of the three-dimensional relationship between art, love and life. I was incapable of embracing the concepts of it. Hell, I was rarely capable of embracing anything without a surgeon general's warning label attached to it.

But my teacher's answer was that art is what each individual interprets it to be. There are no concrete definitions, no hard and fast lines between what is art and what is not.

Honestly, that did not make sense to me at the time. In the black and white life that I led, that just did not compute.

Thank God, things have changed since then.

Art imitates life—life is what you make it.

The glass is half empty or half full, or totally full or empty for that matter. Life is open to interpretation. It can be deemed good, bad or indifferent. Just as art can be art or not art depending on the point of view of the person doing the looking.

Loving an artist has also opened me to sensitiveness that I didn't know was a part of me.

Now, I believe that this sensitiveness is inherent in each of us, but most of us non-artists never explore it to the depths that artists do. They are naturally gifted to see and interpret things in a light that is different, better, from the norm of dreariness and drudge that many of us move through.

The artists that I have met are eccentric in some way. But in another way of thinking, perhaps their eccentricities are only extensions of their given sensitivities--their natural openness to beauty that surrounds, envelopes, and lends to their artistic abilities.

Maybe though, it isn't they who are eccentric after all—to the contrary, perhaps it's that those like me are dulled to what we shouldn't be, what we weren't meant to be dulled to.

In any case, loving an artist has taught me this: To love an artist is to learn a love for art.

To love art is to learn a love for life.

For art imitates life, that has become quite clear to me.

And what else has become clear is that that the three, life, love and art, are inseparable, thanks to the artist that I love.

Signed,

The Man With A Second Chance...