Why Do We Create Art

 -  A BBC Documentary: Forest, Field, and Sky: Art out of Nature 

Why do we create art? I feel sometimes, rather, we should ask why don’t we create art?  It is such an incredible, beautiful thing to bring art into being.

Participative art with nature, for me, brings the emotions within our limbic brain onto surface, and enables us to connect our roots to the ancient desire to be in and connected to the nature.

David Nash’s Ash Dome was a piece of work that started in 1977. It was pruned and shaped by both nature and the artist into the delicate ash dome, which still resides in secrecy in the Snowdonia region of northwest Wales today, and continues to illuminate its ever changing yet enduring beauty in the seasons of nature.

Andy Goldsworthy goes into the nature, look into the nature, and creates art works that are inseparable from the raw material of nature: stone, fallen leaves, slates, rock, wood. They are often raw, and transient.  In the process of creating, the artist learnt to be in congruence with the intrinsic properties of the materials and their surrounding conditions.

Julie Brooks creates the relationship with the nature through multiple forms; the forms are often shaped by the tides of the sea, the severity of the weather, or the geographical quality of a place.  

Richard Long explores mark making in the nature and brings an artist’s intension in full to his work. The consciousness of the artist and the intension of the work create an energy field that draws the curious minds in and ponder.

Charles Jencks landscape work is drawing in nature and James Turell’s sky space is the window for the viewers to experience the sublime.  Here the artist role is like a guide to the sublime so that travellers wont miss it. 

In our conscious living, I think assess to the arts is intrinsic to a high quality of life; this high quality of life has nothing to do with living and breathing through the gallery space; rather it has everything to do with the ability to see and the openness to experience.  

By connecting the forest, field, and coast into the work of art, nature becomes the womb that brings art to life, and becomes the passage that brings the public many closer to the art works that are often created with love, care, and intensity.  

So why don’t we create art?