Art has been at the core of my identity for as long as I can remember. The “A” at the end of my name was always allocated to “artistic” when making acrostic poems in elementary school. If I was feeling generous, I’d double down and make the “C” stand for “creative”. I took pride in my tiny clay pinch pots from art class and learned new instruments with remarkable ease. My fine art and music courses were the highlight of my day throughout middle and high school. In college, I minored in music and practiced my painting skills on my own time, as often as I could. However, after undergraduate school, I had no formal art education, and less motivation to practice my art independently. My days became filled with the study of psychology and the general circus act of attending graduate school. As we were asked to provide fun facts about ourselves in classes, I gravitated toward my usual answer: “I’m an artist! I love to make music, paint, and crochet.”
For the first time in my life, that fun fact rolled off my tongue with an unusual bitterness. Who was I to call myself an “artist”? I had never gone to art school. Most of my formal art education ended in my teens. Very few people had ever paid for my art, except for a couple at street fairs. I ruminated on the artist identity that I had woven into my personality for so long. Did I even deserve to have it anymore? I should’ve maintained my practice more diligently. I should’ve made more efforts to find mentors and save up for lessons. Any art that I made around that time felt rudimentary and unworthy of seeing the light of day. What is art, then, if it’s not even witnessed?
Let’s be specific for a moment. I’d like to propose a working definition of the word “artist”, plainly, as “a person who makes art”. I never claimed to be a professional artist. If it were true that the only real artists were those who made a living entirely on their art, then we’d have very few real artists in the world! A major tenet of REBT is acceptance (that is, self-acceptance, other-acceptance, and life-acceptance). In self-acceptance, we learn to identify ourselves as neither good nor bad people. We learn to state the facts of our existence without judgement. I’ll try it for you here. I can call myself an artist on the basis that I give rise to art. Yes, my proportions are definitely way off sometimes. No, I have no idea how to color match, but I’ll still try. I enjoy making art. That’s a fact! I enjoy watching my friends light up when I custom make them a project. That is a fact, too. My art is neither good nor bad. It just is.