Art is For Everyone
No matter who made the piece of art you are experiencing – the art means nothing without you.
Meet the Artist
David Terrell
Hi. My name’s David Terrell and I’m an artist. It took me decades of savings and going four steps forward and three steps back, or sometimes thirteen. And some years of giving up. But I’m an artist now.
Artist. That word can cover a lot of ground, can’t it? Before you can use that word, you have to say what art is, because an artist is a person who plays with art. So here’s my definition:
Art is you making your life meaningful to you.
Breaks a few of the rules I learned along the way, but the way I see it, that’s art. What I mean is that, no matter who made the piece of art you are seeing – no, more than seeing, the art you are experiencing – the art means nothing without you. I hope that ennobles you, because it ennobles me. It also democratizes the whole thing.
Nobility and democracy at the same time. If that’s not the essence of art, then what is?
You are part of the power of art.
Who has more power, artists or scientists, leaders of countries, leaders of movements, inventors, medical innovators – okay, you can say billions of people are alive today because of one or more particular vaccines or other inventions. But none of these are the names most of you were thinking of when I started. You were thinking Caesar and Washington and people you have been taught are powerful. If you were thinking Mandela and Havel and Martin Luther King, Jr. you were moving in the right direction. If you were thinking Brunelleschi, Mark Twain, Ansel Adams and Edward Albee – hello.