Art is Pain

I'm going to be reblogging the posts from my blog tour earlier this past October, just in case anyone missed them in their original locations. They discuss writing generally, but are all tied back into Rmnce, my most recent release which tells a story of new love through the text messages and letters between characters.

The opening post of my blog tour for Rmnce was hosted by the sci-fi author Len Berry, who published the dystopian novel Vitamin F this summer. The tour begins with an age old question.

29^th September – What is Art. Hosted by Len Berry.

http://lentberry.wordpress.com/2012/09/29/guest-post-what-is-art/

Art is Pain

They say art is pain. They say the same thing of love and beauty, and while these sorts of platitudes are the written equivalent of drunken regret the parallel has a bit of validity. Art IS pain, it is very much the emptying of a tortured soul onto a page, a canvass, or a stage. And what more ubiquitous and artful agony is there than that of romantic love? It is the defining pain of human existence, a fragile and tempestuous emotion; it builds on itself exponentially until it either reaches a sort of Singularity, a critical mass which alters its form subtly into a force harder than steel, or else collapses under its own weight like a star with the tiniest bit too much mass.

Thus, one will often find that a great writer (painter, actor, musician) will have behind them a tumultuous and nearly self-destructive romantic history. After all, if art is pain, more pain would, it stands to reason, tend to produce more art, whether in the sense of pure mass of production or greater concentration. However, what one has to ask oneself is, do artists become artists because their history of disfiguring romantic entanglements gives them the inspiration to do so, or is the artistic temperament simply prone to the sort of emotional extremes which produce the romances which burn twice as hot and half as long?