by Michael Fassbender

Created on: August 02, 2008   Last Updated: October 06, 2011

Skills are learned, by their very nature; artistry, however, is inborn.

In the artistic sphere, skills are tools with which one makes art. They are not art in themselves. Such skills might range from the ability to draw a recognizable face, through the ability to play the guitar, to the ability to string words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. The utilization of those skills to draw a picture, or to play a song, or to compose a story is art.

Skills are merely techniques for the creation of an effect, and anybody can learn the basics. If one places one's finger on the sixth string of a properly tuned guitar above the fifth fret, and then strikes the string, one will sound the A note. Pick a different string or a different fret, and one can sound a different note, with a total of 12 possibilities before repeating the cycle. One can learn scales of five or seven notes, and know that as long as one picks only one of those selected notes, the piece will be in harmony with itself; one can learn to select different notes of the same scale on three to six strings and strum them together as a chord. All of that knowledge is useless, however, without artistry.

Artistry is an internal drive and vision. It is a drive that propels the artist to create, and it is a vision that shows the artist what kind of an effect to seek. These two impulses exist together, rather than striking independently. One does not think, "I really feel like creating something, but I don't know what." When one truly wishes to create, one wishes to create something in particular. One wants to write a short story or a poem; one wishes to play a certain kind of song, or perhaps to compose one; or one wants to draw a picture to express that image that hangs vaguely in the back of the mind. One starts with a sense of something that one wants to express, and then looks for a medium with which to express it in a meaningful and satisfying manner.

At its most basic level, artistry is intrinsic to humanity. This is due in part to the faculty of imagination, which all humans share to some degree. Imagination is crucial to all artistry; it is where all artistic ideas begin, and where they grow until the person needs to direct them outward into some kind of external form, usually where the end product can be shared. When that happens, a sort of "magic" results: the idea that has taken hold in the mind of the artist now begins an independent life in the minds of dozens, or hundreds, even millions

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