Picasso said that The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

That’s a beautiful and poetic thought! To me, this quote expresses a byproduct of creating art. I often say that painting is meditative for me. I compare it to breathing and dreaming. It is centering and restorative. It washes the dust of daily life off my soul… but I don’t see that as the purpose.

For ME, the purpose of art is to communicate. I don’t mean here’s a picture of a tree, and it communicates what a tree looks like.

I believe art is how we communicate what it means to be a human being.

Words are a wonderful way to express, with great nuance, our experience of this fleeting time we have in our bodies. But the reader must understand the symbols we call letters, and the language that our sentences form in order for the message to be understood.

I can’t read hieroglyphics, but I can relate to the images created by ancient people.

The images I create have to speak for themselves. I won’t always be there to interpret the pictures.

The viewer must extrapolate the meaning, whether they are looking at an image of a tree, a fish in a tree, or a complete abstraction.

What I have seen and what I have felt are in the layers of paint. These experiences interface with the accumulated experiences of the viewer, and communication happens.

You might shrug and say So what? Or I don’t get it. Or you might say Me too!

Maybe the viewer is a fellow human, alive in my lifetime. Maybe someone will find something I have made 3,000 years from now. Or 20,000 years from now. Maybe an alien being will stumble across my art long after humans have disappeared. Maybe they will have eyes to see it.

Maybe.

Maybe they will see that I was a human, and that I felt like this.