Power Art

Art is odd.  It is both incredibly personal and purposefully public, so it’s starting from an odd place to begin with, I suppose.  And it’s usually made by introverts as their path to the outside.  It seems like that push and pull of the private and public applies to all formats – flat art that lives on a piece of paper or a canvas, 3-D art that takes up space in a room, art that’s meant to be heard, art that’s made to be experienced – all of it. I find the artists to be the most fascinating.  These people walk around next to you and me, and carry all these ideas around with them in their heads, holding them until the medium of their choice is available to them.  The best part of spending time with artists is when they lose the battle of holding their art in. When it starts to leak out around the edges we get a glimpse of their realness.  I’m sure you’ve experienced it.  Have you ever been in a meeting with someone who, while fully participating in the discussion of the moment, ends up “doodling” something that should hang on a wall in a museum?  Or noticed someone in a grocery aisle moving to the music while they work their way down their shopping list?  Those are leaky artists.  Some of them don’t even know they have the art in them – they dismiss the leaks as nothing and, after shaking off the slight high the leak caused, go back to being as regular as they can as if they can erase that previous transgression.

I let my art flow.  I fully accept my internal artist and encourage him to show up however and whenever he wants.  I have zero interest in being normal, and I revel in the oddity of art. I am always ready for the leaks and I do my best to capture the results and preserve them for later.  I do my time with normal and boring, too.  It’s a necessary evil for now.  Once I’ve been Discovered I can let that part go.  So far, the only people who recognize the value of my art don’t have the ability push me forward.  I’ll find them, or they’ll find me.  The longer I wait the more leaks I’ll have and the more I can collect.

I’m not a typical artist.  I like attention in real time.  I don’t need to hide behind my art – I want to stand in front of it or next to it and bask in the glow of the attention.  That attention is delicious.  It fuels me.  All those eyes, pointing at me, trying to consume my art and whatever else they can suck out of me, give me power.  I control how much of me they can have and, as a result, how much of me they want.  I love that part of the game.  I have different levels of control over different people, and they all react differently.

It’s especially entertaining to play with the men – the straight men.  They don’t understand what’s happening, and are usually only consuming the art because someone drug them there in the first place.  They didn’t want to be there, and didn’t think they cared about art at all.  And then they feel the pull in, the pull in to me.  And then they feel want, of me.  And then they get all confused.  Why are they feeling things about art and about a man?  They woke up in the morning with their usual hard-on, with images of heavily breasted women in mind, which gave them their daily dose of masculine reassurance.  They agreed to the art event as part of their day-long quest for sex, hoping that this willingness to participate would leave their wife or girlfriend in The Mood by the time they got back into bed.  And then they met me…experienced my art and my power…and found themselves thinking other thoughts, new thoughts, uncomfortable and unexpected thoughts.  And then they realize that I don’t want them – that I am just an innocent (ha!) bystander in their art encounter and that their wife/girlfriend wants me and my art, too, and they end up even more unsettled.

I don’t want anything more from these people than the attention in the moment.  And I want them pulled in by my art as much as by me.  I really am an innocent bystander, just waiting for when I do make the leap to the next level.  I want that more than anything.  I am open for relationships along the way, of course.  I prefer to connect sexually with other artists who choose to welcome the leaks.  The things two artists can do and create together are almost unbelievable.  The combined power and expression can be overwhelming in the most worth-it way imaginable.  I don’t tend to stay in those relationships very long, and I get bored to spend too much time with regular people.  I guess I’m hard to please?  I don’t know.  I know I’m single right now and that I usually am.  That gives me more time to make and display my art so it’s not all bad.

**All 30-minute musing posts are fiction**