I ask for so much from art but sometimes I think I offer nothing in return.
After years of thinking this way, I realized that art asks for my attention and focus. Not my perfection, not my productivity—just me. Art asks you to show up, to listen, to engage. It asks for your willingness to wrestle with uncertainty, to risk vulnerability, to sit in the silence where ideas form ( if you can do so, you are more disciplined than I am.)
Art doesn’t demand grand gestures. It doesn’t care if you have all the answers. What it craves is your attention, your curiosity, your willingness to let it lead sometimes. It wants you to trust it, even when it makes no sense.
Previously I mentioned that “I offer nothing in return”, but consider this: you give art a space to exist. Without you, it would remain unmade. You give it form, even if only in fragments. You give it life, even if only for yourself.
What happens if you start treating art like a relationship rather than a transaction? What if, instead of asking art to serve you, you asked how you could serve it? What might it become if you gave it your trust, your time, your patience? Then I thought:
Art is a companion. Maybe that’s all it’s ever asked of you.
Whoa.
Yeah, that one got me. Sometimes we get so caught up in getting something from our art—validation, meaning, escape—that we forget it’s alive in its own way. It wants something from us, too. Maybe just a little reverence. Maybe just to be made without expectation. Maybe just to exist without needing to prove itself.
Art is weird like that. It mirrors what we bring to it. If we demand, it resists. If we fear, it hesitates. But if we listen, art speaks to us. .
