Inside Living The Photo Artistic Life magazine January 2021 issue

It takes courage to face down a blank canvas every day. It takes courage to dream up an idea, stifle one’s self-doubt, and engage in the struggle to bring that idea to life. All artists eventually learn this.
The best learn to muster that courage routinely, as a way of living. And that’s a good thing. Because, with artists being the passionate and highly imaginative lot they are, I’m convinced it’s precisely that courage that ulti­mately keeps them sane.
To be sure, the year just past was pre­cisely the sort to try anyone’s sanity. And so I like to think the devotion our artists brought again and again to the blank canvas helped them through these long strange months.
It’s worth remembering that each of the images in the pages ahead never HAD to be. The artist could have gotten down on life and skipped that day. Could have chickened out. Could have given in to some bout of despondency and thrown in the towel halfway through.
But they didn’t. They sat down, they set to work, and they finished. They found their way past whatever it was they needed to get past that day, and in the end produced the art we now get to enjoy here.
What’s more, their original inspiration now bolsters our own. But only because they first chose to create something beautiful … when it would have been so much easier to turn on a television or languish on social media or in the news feeds.
For an artist, that choice – to create something imaginative or beautiful, in spite of all the craziness and uncer­tainty in the world – is the real act of courage. Facing down the blank canvas again and again is the artist’s way of taking up arms against it all. Though it is also in its way an act of love. As all acts of impassioned creativity must be if they are to flourish on the page or the screen … and so reach us in turn, reminding us that however difficult the times, art still matters- this world of beauty and imagination, and the renewal they bring to the human spirit.

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• The Economist UK Edition – January 16, 2021
• History Today – April 2020