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Let's not kid ourselves, an artist who once sung his song of life and now finds that he has no voice is in a sorry state. The desire to express and yet not finding the ability to do so is frustrating and disenheatening. Sometimes, unfortunately for himself and for the rest of us, the artist might give up art altogether coming to terms that he is a "has been".

But nothing could be more false. The fact of the desire to express oneself is the greatest proof under the sun that the artist still remains strong and is vibrantly running through his veins. The problem then is not the wanting to be an artist, but the manner in which he goes about actually being one.

Perhaps one of the most common problems that people come across is that of identification. There are two forms of identification, one of how the artist identifies himself, and how he identifies with the medium he expresses himself with.

With regard to the self, sometimes we hold too strongly with a self preception too strongly, and all the while we have within ourselves been changing, and when the change is done we find that we no longer are what we were. We must realize that we grow older and wiser and that all that we experience in every way helps to develop us and to create us. We are in a constant state of flux no less than the world around us. And therfore we mustlearn to perceive ourselves according to what we are now, and not according to what we were yesterday.

This is not as esoteric as it may sound. A person could begin with something quite basic, like their favorite color. Most kids have a favorite color. And many times the gender of the child will determine their favorite color. It is even taken for granted that when we shop for children blue is for boys and pink is for girls. And this image stays with us for the rest of our lives. Do you really have a favorite color? An artist might get into the mood of a theme and the theme will have such a great affect on him that they don't want to give up the ride. Perhaps you have an interest in other things now, new themes? Even something so personal as self image. We change. The fact that we grew long hair in highschool and wore jean jackets with cool patches sewn on to them, or wore jogging suits all the time, or dressed preppy for every occasion had a powerful impact of how we saw ourselves, in as much as we chose to dress that way to begin with because of self image. Do you still identify with the image of how many years ago? Sometimes we insist on closing

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