Can't Art Just Be Art?

Or must it mean something? I've been looking through some of the first art journals I did when I came back to art several years ago. I just wanted to create. To make something and I tackled dime store journals with a vengance. Altering covers, making glue books, altering the insides of books and then writing and pasting, coloring, and drawing and on and on and on until I had stacked up a little fortress of journals. This week I'll show you some of them.
But as I was looking at them and through them, it occurred to me. So what? What did this actually mean? Most of them there seemed to be no clear cut answer to the question. A puzzle impossible to solve. So I guess the answer is that I just made art for the sake of making art. Doing something with my hands. Visualizing the layout and experimenting with different techniques and just plain having fun and enjoying what I was doing.

Many reflect whatever blogs I was in the habit of following during the given time and whatever subject matter or color scheme I happened to be drawn to.

Some seemed to have a theme and others did not. Some of them I see now were in learning to use either tools or substances I was not familiar with to achieve an effect that pleased me. Such as I see on some of these either wax or diamond glazes. Never before had I even done stamping with inks.

Remember I was a doll maker and the only art instructions I'd ever had were in oil painting. I had fooled around with charcoals and was a crafty gal but this stuff was new to me.

I'm now showing a Star book I made and it was fun to make but there it sits on a shelf and really says nothing about me or what I'm about or where I want to be in life. Nothing complicated. Just a book that when open resembles a star and is cute or maybe even kinda WOW. That's cool.

And the one I will post about tomorrow is a book really pleasing for me to look at as the colors are all right there on the mark and it is showing a little growth in where I was in art as it has a theme of some of the things I did as a child so is probably getting there with a little more meaning.

But creating based on our childhood is really a Freebie. Because the subject matter requires no thought. Who else knows us besides ourselves and it is easy to slap something together and say "this is what we did".

There are some I choose not to post and not because I don't feel the product looks "worthy" to be shown as this is not what our art is about anyway but because I don't want others to see some of it and get an opinion of me based on what I made. Partially nude ladies for an example and art is art and there is absolutely nothing shameful about our bodies, but my mind was heading in a thousand directions when I first began journaling and it seems to be heading toward different paths today.

You know the saying: I'm not where I want to be but Thank God I'm not where I used to be.

I think we have to be very careful because we can become "preachy" and sometimes there is a fine line between being humble and seeming pious. I am trying to grown in Christ and be the person He created me to be and I know any talents I have are through Him. I'm not about beating myself up in thinking I've done anything wrong with my art. It's all about learning and growing and isn't that what life itself is about?

I got a kick out of re-visiting my journals and am glad I saved them because I feel that I am almost ready to begin a different form of journaling. I'm not quite sure what form it will take, but it feels like there is a spark about to ignite in journaling for me! And ya know.. I think it takes every single step we take in life to get us to the place we end up.

So maybe I should have called this post "Journaling Through The Journey Of Life".

'yall have yourselves a good one 'ya hear. mizmollye