Sort of like a dream.

You couldn’t get a better definition of art than that: art is the place where we dream our lives, where we momentarily leave the heaviness of life behind.

‘Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly’ wrote Flaubert, ‘ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling, than to conjure away the burden and the bitterness.’

For what is art but an act of grace, a creation of some alternative world so that our own world is momentarily shot through with meaning? If we don’t know why life itself exists, surely art is our last poetic gesture towards the mystery at the heart of us.

This is the reason art still exists through wars, through famine, through our deepest misery. Art is not measurable in dollars and cents, or only in “proper” paintings of people with real faces. Art is an invisible commodity with the highest of invisible values.

To dream, to joyfully play: art’s life, found wherever life is found.

From “The Broken Book” 2004 Susan Johnson