Painters Of Light.
{Photo credit: Jim Wern}
What is beauty if not shared? It’s like a hidden candlelight.
What is art without expression? It’s like the stars without the night.
What is talent never used? It’s like having riches squandered.
What is risk if not worth taking? It’s like the path that’s never wandered.
It is the responsibility of the artist to engage humanity in the beauty of life. Without the creative soul, mankind would wallow in self-destruction; destined to build structures of confinement, burrow holes that swallow cities and amass worthless riches. Humanity has a bent toward conformity of the masses and monotonous repetition.
Without a cure, it will build an ever spiraling wall of self-imprisonment and die. Who will save us from ourselves?
We, the carriers of light, are the masked superheroes and heroines of the heart. Ever misunderstood, often under-appreciated, we fight for love and the fortuity of being. Without the artist, the human experience is reduced to the evolutionary cycle of life, taking function over form, relegating beauty to practicality.
The creative soul reminds us that curiosity, expression and enjoyment are innate qualities of life and necessary for survival. They are as vital as a heartbeat, and as important as the air we breathe.
We transform an earth cycle into a glorious dawn, spreading a glistening blanket of warmth over a chilled meadow, awakening it and the senses of the soul. We open the eyes of mankind to a spectrum of light not seen with the naked eye, lifting heads to see a vast magnificent horizon or focusing their attention on the delicacies of love.
In words rich with color and teeming with energy, we write, we paint, we engage the soul in the art of living. But not without a cost.
Life does not favor the contemplative. There is no use for those who do not pull their weight.
The artist is an endangered species, often hunted for sport, in a land of bulls and bears, exploited for profit and rendered useless unless productive. But in a world of concrete walls and bottom lines, cracks form, and life seeps through.
Like the delicate sapling popping through the last vestiges of winter frost, the creative finds a way to break through and show us the lovely side of living.
If there is hope for humanity, it will be revealed by the pen and palette or lens and lathe of the artist whose hands uncover the hidden gems of life, holding them up for all to see and bending the light to shine all around.
It is an arduous task to breach the shores of ambivalence and scale the mountains of despair that surround the human experience, but the artist, like the sapling, takes the carbon residue of existence, infuses it with light, and transforms it into life-giving beauty.
We need more creative souls, brave enough to wage war on apathy and cynicism, and to remind us that we are surrounded by treasures of great worth in the people around us and their contribution to the mosaic of life.
There is a world of immeasurable grandeur waiting to be explored, if only people would look up and see what is right in front of their eyes. Our job is to cast the gaze of humanity upon the canvas of creativity and introduce them to life’s wonderful side.
The artist is the mirror of everything marvelous, a prism, bending the eye to all that is possible, and the painter of light upon the backdrop of creation. So, shine your light and let the world see how beautiful it is, and restore the awe to all that is around us.
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Jim Wern is a renaissance man in a modern world; a spiritual traveler, searching for vestiges of the divine in humanity and imparting seeds of hope in a desolate world. He is a husband, father, friend, mentor, creative, tech geek, amateur writer, photographer and chef. His ramblings can be found at his website. He lives in sunny Southern California with his beautiful wife of 31 years.
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