by Silva Payne

Created on: August 11, 2009   Last Updated: July 25, 2010

When we consider the concept of what is art, many of us will conjure up an image in our mind of a painting or drawing. This is traditionally what art in the literal sense has come to mean, but in reality it encompasses a whole range of media. The essence of art is creative expression. It is how an individual expresses their emotions, feelings inspirations and thoughts.

Many people use art to express their happiest feelings. There are 3 main ways that this manifests. Either by creating an image or item that reminds them of happy times, or creating whilst being happy, or creating to stimulate happiness. To understand these expressions, we need to explore what can trigger them.

All of us at some time has taken a photograph of a happy event, perhaps a birthday party, a wedding, or a graduation. Many of us store those photographs, whether on traditional paper in an album or on a digital CD or memory device. Why do we make them? To capture the moment. Why do we keep them? To remember or experience in a small way the same feelings we had when the image was captured. As beings, we all want to feel happy, and we learn very quickly in our development that recalling good things can help us achieve that state of happiness. The creation of the image is art.

Sometimes, those of us who are so inclined, feel the need to create while we are happy. Happiness encourages us to feel productive, to try new ideas or techniques, while we are in a frame of mind that can cope with disappointments if it doesn't quite work out how we had hoped. The happiness may also allow us to see the results in a more positive way, which leads to further creativity. This self-encouragement is evident in cookery. The sharing of food is a universal expression of happiness and inclusion. The creation of that food is an expression of art in an edible form.

The desire to create something when we are not feeling our best, in order to stimulate the endorphins in our brains and make us happier can be very strong. We all know people who shop for clothes when they are feeling low. We may see it as purely retail therapy, but their actions of piecing together an outfit from different fabrics, colours and textures is a creative process and the end result a work of expressive art, even though they are using pre-existing designs to achieve it.

Fortunately for the world, yet unfortunately for certain individuals, some of the greatest art works have been created by those who are in the deepest depressive states. Periods of melancholy seem to stimulate the creative process just as much as happiness. Poetry, and its close cousin, song, would be bland and one-dimensional if it were not for the out-pourings of grief and torment by the likes of Sylvia Plath and Tennyson or Shelley. To make a mark on some kind of surface as an expression, is art. The formation of words, letters, even simple symbols on a page, cloth, plank or any other surface, creates a pattern, and thus is art.

Art encompasses every act of creative expression, not just those that leave a visible trace. Dance in all forms is art, yet it is transient, fluid and never repeated exactly the same way twice. Dance in folk-culture has grown from expressive actions, each dance tells a story. Storytelling, whether written, sung, drawn or danced, is all art.

Art is creative expression, in all its manifestations.

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