Why Do Artists Create Art? Online Group Exhibition
I’d like to thank all the artists who entered this competition and all the sponsors who support the artists. Please visit the sponsors via the links shown below.
Written by Veronica Winters, MFA | Edited by Vladislav Fomitchev
You might think that artists create art for a variety of reasons. We find an outlet to communicate our ideas, to express our emotions, to capture a moment in time, to tell a story, or to bring inspiration and joy into people’s lives. Some artists create art to make money, while most artists produce art to express their soul and talent because they feel a pure need to create.
Learning to express ourselves visually is a need. Without having this deep drive to create the artist may remain just a skilled illustrator or a good craftsman. Many artists experience the urgency to paint especially when they’re deprived of it for quite some time.
Most artists feel the need to paint because doing art is freeing. It fixes our inner yearning and heals our pain. Artists often paint to fill a void inside them because creatives process emotions visually. To develop a unique visual language, every artist must do a deep dive inside his soul to understand his Why. Why do you create what you create? What does it accomplish? What do you want others to see in your artwork? These are the questions that are always there for the creatives to think about. After all, that’s how the artist discovers his purpose and meaning as well as the meaning behind his own creations.
Artists enjoy the process of creation so much that they commit to spending years learning the craft. It’s often not enough to have a 4-year college degree to master the skill and develop a unique vision. But because artists can’t live without art just like you can’t live without your heart, they are driven to produce art.
Many artists create art in progression of skill and personal growth. Artists keep painting, sculpting, and writing to make this world less dark and more beautiful. As art brings beauty home, artists paint emotions, not subjects or objects. And that’s the reason why you can really fall in love with a piece. You connect to it emotionally.
Since the 19th century, artists have gained freedom to create personal art that was very different from expected religious scenes, formal portraiture, and mythological illustrations. Stepping away from widely accepted academic painting, many new art styles have emerged since. Art Nouveau, Impressionism, Cubism, abstraction, surrealism, art installation, photography, new media and so many more!
The freedom of artistic voice is almost always affected by external culture. Why do we look at human history through ancient objects, architecture and painting? Early excavations, Renaissance masters, modern art… Art is never created in a void. Yes, it expresses emotion but it also comments on fashion, culture, events or political divisions in society. Sometimes it becomes a propaganda tool to express the political and economic glory of a nation.
Art is a visual language that’s often taken for granted because it’s all around us. However, if you remove every picture, poster, cover, book, sculpture, movie, cartoon, song just for one day you’ll experience a profound lack of beauty, thought, and inspiration. Art is a mirror for your soul. It’s a place to see your true self. It’s a depiction of feelings we often hide, suppress, or don’t even think about.
How long did it take you to paint this?
All artists get one question they may or may not find exciting. Viewers often try to start a conversation with this question. Artists either try to calculate the hours spent painting the art or get upset by the very nature of this question because the number of hours may not reflect all the unseen work, and sweat spent in the trenches learning the craft.
Don’t ask the artist how long he painted the art, ask him why he painted it. A lot of creatives need to process this question in their mind and heart themselves! This is the most fascinating part about creation. Artists produce something beautiful out of “nothing.” Understanding that space is peeking into the artist’s heart and mind. When I look at someone’s art, I also see how deep the artist travels inside himself. If there is exploration of feelings, social themes or intelligence. Painting is simply a journey into the artist’s soul. It’s an invitation to look into yourself without saying a word and to make personal discoveries. This in turn enriches our soul giving more meaning to what we do in our work.
When you see great art in a museum, you want to come back to it to experience it again, to find something exciting in it. The same painting can give you a different meaning, feeling, or story. It can make you look at life a bit differently. It can make you laugh or cry but it can’t leave you indifferent. While the curation of our taste in art comes from our knowledge and understanding of art history, art collecting should be about emotion, aesthetics, and the joy of appreciating beautiful work. By bringing art home you fill the need for beauty and emotion but you also make a difference in an artist’s life. You give the artists more reasons to create art and develop their vision and skill.
While there’s a lot of speculation at the top tier of the art market, most artists produce art to say something personal as opposed to making a quick buck. While top art collectors purchase art as an investment, most artists feel their art is getting devalued by daily offers of free work for ’’exposure’’ or with why-is-it-so-expensive questions. Even though they need it to continue painting, artists often search for meaning and beauty, not money. The dream of every artist is to keep creating and get paid for all their unseen work that can’t be measured in standard terms… To make a living, yes, but an artist’s real dream is to create art that touches your soul or makes a positive change in your life.
Nicole Finger
Award: Gift Certificate from Jerry’s Artarama
Making art has always been my most natural mode of expression. Creating something with my hands, eyes and mind always could be more highly curated than letting thoughts spill out of my mouth! I create because it has become habitual, meditative and satisfying. Harnessing creativity in both the process and end product is purely selfish; it fulfills a sense of productivity and feels like a daily hit of serotonin!
Barb Sotiropoulos
Award: digital subscription to the Colored Pencil Magazine
I have never known a time in my life when I wasn’t creating art in some way. There were seasons when I was able to create more abundantly than others, but I have always been driven to do something creative. In the times that I wasn’t creating as much art something always felt off or unnatural. I believe that artists are creative to their core and that when we aren’t making art our spirits often feel out of alignment. I endeavor to explore the themes and stories that I see in my head through my artwork. Often when these stories and themes find me they will haunt me until I create them. It’s almost as if they need to be born into the world somehow. As artists, I believe we are the conduits to make that happen. I create for myself, my spirit and to hopefully connect with others by experiencing the work I create.
Ali Rouse
Award: Gift Certificate from Jerry’s Artarama
I create as I don’t know how to exist without creating. It is as breathing. Beauty is creation and creations surrounds us everywhere.
Nancy Jacey
Award: Gift Certificate from Jerry’s Artarama
Every day I wake up inspired by the world around us: the colors, details and elements that make up our surroundings. I am fascinated by life’s details, and I like to reflect this in my everyday life and in my career as an artist. I constantly study and photograph the world around us and use these references and experiences in my artwork and in my teaching.
I like to vividly capture these personal interactions and bring them to life for my audience in large-scale oil, acrylic and colored pencil paintings. I work as a full-time artist, mother, small business owner and private art instructor.
Kimberly Raboin
Award: digital subscription to the Colored Pencil Magazine
I create art because I want to capture the beauty of the natural world and also communicate inner experiences and emotions. Recently I’ve been practicing realism with colored pencil and my subject matter has been landscapes. In my landscape work I’ve tried to capture the beauty of places I’ve visited, and also the feelings I experienced while there. My hope is that my recent landscapes convey a sense of vastness and serenity.
My most recent colored pencil drawing ‘Wings of Renewal’ combines my love of landscapes with symbolism. The butterfly in this piece is a symbol of transformation and change. I hope to create more work that combines realism and symbolism.
Dean Rogers
Award: digital subscription to Create! Magazine
This piece represents the culmination of a lifetime of work. The books in the background are the inspiration for an incredible amount of artwork, as well as the series I’ve been creating for the last 5 years.
This series, “Fantasy Meets Reality” is about fantasy creatures who have crossed over into our world. I wanted to create a scene involving a fairy, and I couldn’t think of a better modern fairy pastime than reading relatively recent fantasy novels.
She is using a cell phone like a computer, and she is asking her friends if they would like to go see the movie “Enchanted” which directly inspired me to create this series.
Denise Howard
Gift Certificate from Jerry’s Artarama
I create for many reasons, but perhaps the most important one, and the one behind “Faith’s End,” is that I want people to stop and think, and come away with more than “that’s a pretty picture”.
Visual art has a power where words sometimes fail. Rather than hit the viewer over the head with an obvious message, which they might reject outright, I want them to use their imagination a bit to figure out what’s going on in the picture, what it means to them, and how it makes them feel. If it resonates with them, so much the better. I’ve spent a lot of years developing my skills, so I’d be lazy if I only used them for easily forgotten “pretty pictures”.
Kerry Simmons
Award: $100 Gift Certificate from Ampersand
I find joy and satisfaction in the act of creating. I see every new sheet of paper, or canvas as an opportunity to create something new, bring something into existence that is both my point of view and inspired by the work of other artists and the world around me. When I am painting or drawing I am able to let go of my worries and fears and just be in the moment. I’ve noticed time even operates at a different pace. If I’m thoroughly engrossed in what I am creating, time just whips by. I think for me, being able to create art has been an enormous gift, joy and comfort. One could also say it’s simply a compulsion as I can’t imagine life without it!
Dorian Vallejo
Award: digital subscription to Create! Magazine
This drawing is from a small sketchbook which I used to work from life in the warmer months. Working this way puts me in direct contact with a poetry of life that informs all the work I do. This practice sensitizes me to the beauty nature offers us on a regular basis. Most importantly, it also informs me of how that beauty can be used as a metaphor for the Good.
Ranjini Venkatachari
Award: digital subscription to Create! Magazine
When I discovered the art of Origami and how I can incorporate it in my Trompe-l’oeil still life, my work took a different trajectory. My usual collectors stopped buying my art because I didn’t make pretty still life’s using flowers or fruits anymore. I was discouraged, disappointed, I stopped drawing for a while too. But then I realized I stopped living as well. I was procrastinating, didn’t want to move out of my comfort zone I realized I stopped growing, that’s when I came across the concept of Dharma & Ikigai.
Dharma, is an ancient Sanskrit word that roughly translates to a soul’s purpose in life-the big reason why we are here, and it’s not just what we do, but how we do it, and why we do it. Ikigai is a similar Japanese concept on giving a person purpose life and living. I decided to draw for myself and that completely changed the way I looked at my own work. For me, art is the only reason to get out of my bed each morning and look forward to the rest of my life. I guess that’s how it is for the most of us artists, it’s our primal instinct without which we cannot survive. So I create in order to live my life to the fullest with a purpose.
Traci Wright Martin
Award: digital subscription to the Colored Pencil Magazine
In all my years as an artist, I have spent the most time in an evolving exploration of the portrait. I am fascinated by people and their complex individuality. I marvel at the ability to build strong community by way of the smallest thread of commonality. It is my hope that each and every viewer finds a little point of connection or sees themselves somewhere in my work.
With these ideas in mind, the overall narrative in each series I create weaves in and out of a conversation on perspective and representation. Combined with charcoal drawing as the anchor, I carefully select colorful pastels, patterned papers, and paint techniques to further the themes and create a recognizable, unique identity for my body of work.
Dr. Carla René
Award: digital subscription to Color Crush Course
Long before “realism” was a genre in art, I described my artist self as “an arm with a camera on the end of it”. As a child, I was fascinated that the artist could possess the skill that would mimic the accuracy of a photograph so no one could tell the difference.
Now as an adult, an astrophysicist, and mathematician, the laws of physics show this mysterious symbiotic relationship is possible, so I strive to prove this on a personal level through every piece I produce. I have also developed an original technique using only standard CPs that emulates watercolors, since my attempt to learn them was disastrous. As my confidence grows, I’m able to explore my love of physics by experimenting with chemically-diverse tools. I AM a woman in STEM, and proud. I want to encourage others to find the joy of science, tech, engineering & math as I did.
I’d like to thank all the sponsors of this art competition. Please follow the links to discover awesome products they offer for artists to be creative!
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