INK ON INC

by Greg Busceme, Sr. Executive Director of The Art Studio, Inc.

Art is an activity that every child and most adults enjoy. I always liked using glue, tape and paper to create moderately interesting products for mom to gush over when I came home from school. It wasn’t great but it was better than doing mathematics. We all see art and the process of making art as some window to our lives, a reflection of our taste and a challenge to our skills and imagination. I would like to present another view of Art and what it means to our lives in a more serious and dramatic way. Studying the lives of artists, there is always a pervasive sense that they don’t simply like art but have a deep need for it. It serves to complete them in some way and gives them stability and sense of purpose. Even more than that, it is an almost addictive quality to the driving need to produce work, like Matisse, lying on his deathbed putting cutouts on his ceiling. I have fantasies of my lifeless body found elbow deep in a barrel of clay, my last sculpture drying, half finished, on the table in my studio. There is something to that passion that is more than just enjoyment but rather life-giving sustenance that completes the artist more than any other solace that we can imagine.

In times of crisis such as what we experience with Covid, hurricanes, deep freezes, family loss or other tragic events, physical or mental, that befall us in our personal life, people need some form of healing after these events. In my experience as a teacher, clay classes increase after a cataclysm, small or large (or the movie Ghost). There is no accident that we need to escape the disruption to feel we have some control of our lives, and small accomplishments are victories that give a path out of the crisis we are experiencing.

Art is a relief from the PTSDs of our lives. Not just a feel-good band-aid, but a real and enduring assistance in climbing out of our dark places into the light of healing. Physical activities like boating, meditation, yoga, running, sports, etc. affects our sense of wellbeing, however, the arts, and especially ceramics, have the unique ability to engage the individual in the creative process with physical activity and mental acrobatics to produce a physical expression of the feelings we are having in a solid real object. The artist’s mind can create a manifestation of the demons or angels in our soul and, in so doing, encapsulates their emotions in an object of art.

The therapeutic effects are easily evident if not measurable.

Art has a place in the redemption of someone’s sense of self, their renewal of hope and their return to some form of normality. Yes, enjoyable, but more than that it is the piece of the puzzle that completes us. The food that nourishes us to be human again.

photo by John Fulbright