Are You An Artist?

I want to share with you a quiet moment that I had in the studio today.

After painting papers for a collage, I gathered the brushes and palette ready to clean away the vibrant chaos, when something stopped me. I noticed the beautiful colours and textures spilling beyond the paper’s edge, seemingly rebelling containment.

Was that beauty mine? Did it belong to me? Is the unintentional claimable?

I looked at my hands, stained blue and spatted with white. I look like an artist, I thought.

And then, I let that go. Along with the pressure and expectation. Labelling human expression is like placing a border around the uncontainable. Titles – artist, designer, writer – they simplify and categorise the spectacular facets of humanness, when what leeches from us actually feels like a song we didn't write. Sometimes it's a discordant note, jarring and uncomfortable. Sometimes the world clamours for more, and sometimes it recoils. Are we better at storytelling because we’re labelled an author?

All of it is inside all of us. We’re all poets whispering secrets to the soul, writers weaving tapestries of experience, actors embodying the spectrum of human emotion. We are all psychologists delving into the labyrinth of the mind, doctors mending the broken, singers giving voice to the unspoken. Chefs crafting edible symphonies, lawyers seeking justice, teachers igniting the spark of knowledge.

To be human is to be a kaleidoscope.

Defining ourselves with labels simplifies what is actually a grand and intricate mosaic. We are all messy, glorious, breathtaking, and complex masterpieces.

We are all everything, and none of it, it would seem, belongs to us alone.