By Andrew Ramiro Tirado
The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
The arts are necessary for a holistic life. Imagine life were there no music, past or present - if music simply never existed. Without a musical ‘release valve’ for one’s emotions, I imagine people would simply drop dead long before their time from all the pent-up, unresolved, unexpressed emotion. Whether or not that’s the case, life would certainly be flatter and grayer. It matters not the culture or the socio-economic strata; the arts are central to our existence. Like a container - a vessel - the arts both gather and pour out that which can’t be communicated in other ways. And while that which the arts contain and disperse can be studied, learned, quantified, appraised, and judged, there will always remain an ineffable aspect to creativity. The arts can be a kind of mirror, reflecting ourselves and the world yes, but, if aimed higher, reflecting the heavens - truth, beauty, order, the sublime.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?
Lacuna was the second piece of art I started after ending a decades long ‘separation agreement’ with art, and the first I completed. The word lacuna can mean a hiatus, a gap, a hole, an absence, a chasm, etc., and titling the piece Lacuna, in part, refers to the long span of time where I wasn't sure I would ever return to art - yet a vital period that has marked and deepened my life and my understanding of what my art, and what art as a whole, is about.
My examination of the motif of the hand exemplifies connection with people, place, and possibility. Yet also of separation, dislocation, and unattainability. I desire my work to speak to the whole of life. Not an airbrushed, idealized life, but one containing voids, gaps, depressions. Not just the peaks but the valleys as well.
Someone has said that all art is self-portraiture. It’s correspondingly true that when we view art, as happens with songs meaningful to us, we overlay our lives with the work, imparting to the forms, the textures, the colors, etc., meaning deeply personal to us. We can't help but view the work through a filter of our experiences, our beliefs, our thoughts, both fleeting and enduring. We embed ourselves in the work.
And yet, art has the possibility of drawing us out of ourselves and providing us with a glimpse of the transcendent.
