A Perfect World

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

The Dream 1910 (PD) Henri Rousseau

We recently read a description of what artists do - perhaps the best description ever uttered - in a reprint of a commencement speech given by the late Kurt Vonnegut to the graduating class of Syracuse University in 1994. It is elegant in its spare simplicity and spot on. Mr. Vonnegut was fondly recalling a conversation he had had with one of his favorite teachers:

“The teacher whose name I mentioned when we all remembered good teachers asked me one time, ‘What is it artists do?’ And I mumbled something. ‘They do two things,’ he said. ‘First, they admit they can’t straighten out the whole universe. And then second, they make at least one little part of it exactly as it should be. A blob of clay, a square of canvas, a piece of paper, or whatever.’ “

Cut through all the rationalizing we do about why we feel we must continue to make art each day and what it comes down to, for most of us, is that pure and noble desire to …