"Art enables us to find ourselves
and lose ourselves at the same time."
-Thomas Merton: American Trappist monk, writer, poet, and social activist
This is my all time favorite quotation relating to art. When I looked up the person who declared this, I was very surprised to find that he did not practice visual art at all. In a way, it was shocking to discover that a man who was not a visual artist could make a statement that basically summed up my entire view on what art is in one sentence. To me, art is more of an emotional practice (albeit the foundation you need to first build to make your art successful). People create visual art for a multitude of reasons, but at the core, it is because people want to express themselves in a way that can be observed by viewers. This being said, what I believe Merton is describing is the emotional journey that each artist experiences when creating a piece of art. This emotional journey entails a person being able to lose themselves in their mind to be able to pull out the emotions they want to convey in their work. At the end of this journey, the finished piece of art is the "finding yourself" part because the piece documents your feelings and therefore acts as a personal explanation to what you were feeling.
Sampling of Merton's Works:
Thirty Poems (1944)
A Man in the Divided Sea (1946)
The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)
No Man Is an Island (1955)*
The Silent Life (1957)
Seeds of Destruction (1964)
My Argument with the Gestapo: A Macaronic Journal (1969)
The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1973)
The Non-Violent Alternative (1980)
*Above quotation cited here
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