What makes a great artist?
HERE'S THE WINNING ENTRY!!! (note: unedited)
What makes a great artist?
In my extremeley humble opinion, an artist is someone who creates. Everyone is an artist, being artistic is what seperates us from the animals. What makes a great artist is not the ability they have, or the skill, or the technique, or the experience. A great artist has magnetism, magic, spirit. A great artist makes somebody stop and think, and think again, then reflect and ultimately, react. Wether it be music, the written word, architecture or painting, the ability to make people think about what they are looking at rather than just look and move on, is to me, the greatest gift an artist can posses.
Being technically perfect (if such a skill can be acheived) may be admired and have a certain wow factor but just as a computer can be programmed to play the perfect symphony, it will never have the magic a human, with all his or her imperfections and genius will have. The power to evoke strong emotions in someone with art is a rare feat. Only art with meaning, spirit and a depth that can’t be easily explained can achieve this. To ask someone to go out and create something that will move people is like asking someone to go out and make people fall in love with them. The magic of good art and a good artist is it happens and its something that cannot be explained.
So to me a great artist is someone who can change the way you feel and maybe even change the way you think. And that great artist is sometimes the most unexpected of people - the person who doesn’t realise they are changing the way people feel or think. A great artist won’t create for prestige, or notoriety, or acceptance, or money, or immortality. They just create because...because.
They create. And the creation carries on creating long afterward the artist.
Andy Jones
