Art comes from a natural desire to express our being. It is an impulse that wants to seize an emotion or an intuition and bring it into the world. I think we all have this urge to express ourselves, and to create, everyday.
Whether you do it as a pastime or as your life’s work, that form is born out of who you are. And only you can do it that way, in that moment, whether it is singing or painting or cooking. This is not something you do for others, though you may enjoy sharing it and others may benefit from it. It is something that you do because you want to: it is a form of love.
There are a great many levels to where you can take this, or have fun with it, but basically it is the same aspiration. Some of us though, fly very high.
Lately, I have been listening to Franz Schubert‘s piano compositions which touch a particular cord in my heart. Why Schubert? Why now? I don’t know yet, and being short of words only adds to the joy of being enraptured as I discover more of his music.
Among the many brilliant pianists who play Schubert, I find Maria Joao Pires‘s interpretations poetic, with great depth and subtlety of emotion. As if the air in my soul had been stirred by a bird’s wings, and suddenly I can breathe again.
Not only is she an accomplished artist, she is also somebody who has thought deeply about life, and who infuses everything she does with the same quality of attention. So I will leave her the last words:
“I don’t believe so much in art in terms of something for rich people or talented people, or for the big concert halls or for the big museums. I believe in art in all day life, in everyday, so that you really put it in everything you do, doing things well, with beauty, you know”.
Maria Joao Pires, pianist