She makes art.

She makes it with her hands.
She makes it with her heart.
Pouring her soul into a brush, through paint, onto a canvanss.
An explosion of Passion which molds ideas
And gives them form.
Images dance together,
Spreading colour and light,
FIre and Smoke,
Blood and tears into the void.
 
She makes art.
Not the sterile meaningless pap
Of an inexperienced, half-living, unknowing
Art school graduate
Who traces his formulatic, unfeeling, and intellectual ink-strokes
Onto equally vapid paper.
 
 No.
 
Her art pulls the spirit of its viewer into the heart of her being, wrenching thought, knowleged and feeling into a single point in time and space, and holding it there (and holding it there), immobile; writhing in the single, inexplicable moment captured unmoving (but full of motion) and two dimensional (yet existing in all dimensions) on canvass, until, trapped in that terrible, wonderful singularity, enveloped in all-encompassing emotion, the viewer cries out with the deafening silent scream that can only come from Understanding.
 
She makes art.
The creation of which is an emotional ground zero,
Catching all nearby in the fervour and fury
Of its whirling cacophony.
Feelings become colours become images become emotions become
the Understanding of Thought, Word and Deed.
 
In the moment of viewing
(the moment just before the epiphany)
The viewer finds himself
Naked,
Vulnerable,
Lost in the wellspring of emotion that birthed it.
Unable to cover his vulnerability,
He sees:
His own Hopes, Fears, Terror, Pain, Love, Loss, Joy,
Sadness, Birth, Death, Mirth, Anger, Guilt 
And finds that it mirrors hers.
 
Epiphany
Understanding
Rapture.
 
Her art is not static, unmoving, sterile.
It has motion.
It causes the individual to resonate
With the Totality of her feeling.
Moved by the intensity of the experience,
Changed by his understanding of her understaning,
Touched by the heart of a stranger,
the Viewer moves on,
The memory of the experience Firmly Imprinted
In his bones.
 
She Makes Art.

© Phil Rickaby, 2007