The Supreme Master of Art

We are each given a canvas at birth. The way we spend our days, each individual action, and every decision, is a brush stroke. The opportunities are before us. We can create masterpieces of beauty or brutish scenes of vulgarity. We can actively splash bright and vivid colors into our works or sit back and allow the muted grays and browns of the dullest nature to seep in.  Whether conscious or unconscious, we choose what to paint. We are the masters of our canvases, and the ones responsible for their completion.

But it doesn’t always seem that is the case. We are often our own worst enemies. We feel we have been given an infinite amount of time to complete our work. We push it off onto another day and choose leisure and recreation instead. Rather than tending to the garden of our lives, we allow the weeds to grow and choke out that which was once beautiful. However, we are still the masters of our works and our assignments due upon death, whether we feel we have completed them or not. Here, we must control the things that are in our control.

And yet sometimes, we encounter the things that are not in our control. We can allow these outside influences to halt the progress of our paintings, but that should not be the case. Each obstacle adds a new layer of complexity, and how we deal with it is the texture we add to the canvas. We can’t control the obstacles in our path, but we can control how we respond to them and how we can navigate them.

Only in man’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme Master of Art, as of life.

Joseph Conrad

Imagination. This is the supreme Master of Art. Albert Einstein said, “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” If we can dream it, we can achieve it. And if we can achieve it, then we truly become the artists we were meant to be.

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Feature photo by Rifqi Ali Ridho on Unsplash