The Craft of Art explores ideas about art, and offers a broad perspective about the nature of art and its practice.
Craft: the practice and care of making; a skill of the body and mind.
Creativity: developing a fresh approach when meeting a practical or intellectual challenge.
Art: something created and crafted for the mind and body that carries special significance (emotional, intellectual, spiritual, aesthetic, metaphoric, symbolic, societal, or political).
Art enriches and reveals. Great art inspires, and on each return its force remains, or grows.
When we devote time and energy into making something, the products of our efforts are not only shared, the art, music, dance, stories, and ideas we create have the potential to transform us so we more easily bear the love, pain, and suffering we experience.
All humans are creative, and some become more practised than others. Although crafts have an aesthetic quality, the products of craft are primarily useful, rather than revealing. In the past the word craft was broader and encompassed art, science, talent, and power. Today, crafts people are often not viewed of as having the same cultural or social status as artists. I view the care and skill of the artist (their craft) in equal measure to their ideas and expression.
I am not an academic, but I have thought carefully about art for over forty years, created art since childhood, and produced a broad range of artworks including music, literature, visual art, social, and environmental publications. I hope The Craft of Art encourages thought and debate about art in all its forms.
Mike de Sousa
An idea is abstract and has no physical existence. An idea may be simple or complex and can include imagined sensations experienced by the body. To have an idea I must be conscious: self aware.
Thought: a string of ideas that often leads somewhere.
Art is more than an idea. Art is more than thought alone. If I say a thing is art it does not make it so.
The Craft of Art's central proposition is that art in all its forms is inextricably linked with the care and skill of its making (its craft).
Much of what I say is open to a range of readings, and at times I use poetic language to make my point. You may agree or disagree with my views, and this is how it should be.
The critic asserts their analysis and judgement. At all times be sceptical. Interrogate my thoughts…
