Late, Late Night Thoughts on Art...

It's 5:30 am right now and I haven't gone to sleep yet. Was working on costume stuff for Shape. Kind of reminds me of high school--all those late nights finishing stuff uber late for the costume deadline the next morning. Mr. Will and Michelle used to get mad at me for stuff like that, but I hated to miss deadlines. Sometimes you do what you gotta do...right?

So at this point, I'm debating sleeping at all. I need to get up in an hour and a half anyways, and I think going on the adrenaline rush I've got going now will be more productive than sleeping only an hour. However, I don't know what I will do to fill the time. Then I'm pretty sure I'll get really bored during practice and fall asleep, which I'd prefer not to do. Lots of caffeine? One of these days my body is just going to give up on me. I should make an effort to get more sleep.

So my profound thought for the evening is what it means to be an artist. Not going to go into detail about what sparked this topic, but I've been thinking...one of the things I've always been adament about is having a broad definition of art. Some say that art is that which is appreciated. I would have to agree--but the appreciation doesn't necessarily have to come from a 3rd party. If you create art and you are the only one who finds it artistic...then it is still art, because it is art for you. It makes you feel something, it's your expression and you appreciate it for what it means to you, even if you are the only one who really understands it. This makes sense, yes, because honestly, how often to people really get art exactly in the way that the artist intended? Anyways...my new question is, what if the artist ceases to appreciate his own work? What if you get to a point in life where you quit thinking of yourself as an artist--you consider all your previous work to be false pretenses that someone finally saw through. Now you renounce yourself as an artist. What happens to your work? Is it really, therefore, not "art" since you have declared it not to be so? Maybe when you lose faith in yourself, you need someone to come along side you, to call your art what it is, to call your art beautiful, to understand it and appreciate it--and to help you come back around to that place where you can believe, create, and live again.