Art, a mastery of expression.

When you hear art, paintings and sketches are what normally come to mind. But that obviously doesn’t remotely scratch what art describes.

A few months back, my definition of art was narrowed to paintings and sketches as well. But that changed after my trip to Red Clay Studious, a local tourist site in Tamale founded by Ibrahim mahama. If you didn’t read my post about that trip, I would recommend you check it out.

In that post, I said

Ibrahim himself is a painter and sculpture artist but his perception of art is that art extends just beyond coloring and painting things. He believes there’s art in everything and Red Clay is basically a representation of his way of expressing the art in his mind.

If you go to Red Clay, you’ll barely find any paintings. What you will find though, is a lot of things you normally might not consider art with stories explaining what inspired their creation. And the creator expressing his experience is what led to the art at Red Clay.

Based on that, I like to think that art is a mastery of expression. Whatever you’re expressing defines what art you’re doing. Painters have mastered the art of expressing beautiful designs, photographers have mastered the art of photography and scammers master the art of deception. So in essence, the importance of art in my opinion is to help people express themselves. Just like writing helps you express and communicate your thoughts, art does the same for artists.

Although, I suspect that the Hive Ghana prompt for the work probably just wanted us to stick to art as paintings and sketches. And here I am being extra with philosophy. Lol enough of that. Let’s talk about about in terms of what we’re used to - paintings, pictures and sketches.

One thing I’ve come to love about art is how it serves as a store and preservation of history.

In museums, art doesn’t just represent beautiful beautiful paintings. It represents stories of things from the past. And helps us tie the present to the past.

I saw a controversial video on TikTok some time back talking about why the Mona Lisa is held in such high esteem as opposed to modern art that clearly look better. But if art was solely about what looked best, shouldn’t modern art have been more expensive than the Mona Lisa? Hell AI art should even be more expensive because have you see how beautiful those things are?

What defines how valuable a piece of art is then?

In my experience, I’d say it’s the ability of an observer to appreciate fully the art work. Beauty is not the only thing that lies in the eye of the beholder. Art does too. Not everyone has an eye for it. Which is why you and I can’t seem to wrap our head around people buying paintings you and I have on our phones for free at such exorbitant prices. We simply lack the vision they have.

Why is art important then?

Aside the fact that it’s a way for people to self-express, art is able to provoke questions and emotions about the past.

Mona Lisa is over 500 years old! It’s practically a relic, older than anyone alive today, but the controversy I was talking about in the TikTok video about it’s pricelessness extends beyond just how old it is, but about the techniques that were employed to make that painting. In that TikTok video, claims were made that several bodies were dissected and studied just to make that painting (I stand to be corrected). Now you’re beginning to understand things or at least starting to wonder. And that my friend, is part of what does to you.

I’m drawn to photography

If you still can’t tell, I’m not much of a painting person. I’m more of a photography person. That is my art. My level os mastery is pretty mediocre though, but I’m able to express myself through the photos I shoot in ways that I struggle to explain to sometimes.