Sta.sh
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I have never found a companion who was so companionable as solitude.
Henry David Thoreau
I always thought Thoreau’s comment was simply a word game— ultimately not of much value and false at its core. A Valentines Day in solitude should mean being all alone and alone means being unhappy, pure and simple. Still, it will turn out in life that the most alone we can feel is ironically in the crush of family and friends and even in the embrace of one’s Valentines Day companion— but lost and unfulfilled in one’s dreams and visions.
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Become aware of your aloneness— which is a reality. And it is so beautiful to experience it, to feel it, because it is your freedom from the crowd, from the other. It is your freedom from the fear of being lonely.
Osho
Most all art has to come from a singular obsession. Is a companion, even for Valentine’s Day, a weakness to convention in the face of a need for excellence? It an be many years of Valentines Day cards and chocolates before the true source of loneliness descends: a disconnection to your muse, your art, your desire – the essence of that which makes you an artist. Will you abandon the false happiness of crowds and the search for that special somebody and nostalgic rituals and embrace the search for connection throughout the fullness of the universe through art? Solitude is the path to ultimately connecting with us all— to really touch others with love.
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Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio or looked at television. They had 'Loneliness' and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would work.
Carl Sandburg
Our truest love lies in what we find within ourselves and then share with all humanity. The artists, writers, collaborators, appreciators, and visionaries, here at deviantART, perhaps in solitude in front of their screens and canvasses, share this grand conversation with each other everyday through their own personal, yet fully connected art journey. You can never be “alone” on Valentines Day ever again. The key is in the words of Paul Tillich, the existentialist philosopher, who once said: “Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone.”
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The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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We can recognize the dawn and the decline of love by the uneasiness we feel when alone together.
Jean de La Bruyere
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The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.
Vincent van Gogh
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We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.
Orson Welles
Questions
Would you rather experience the loneliness of a loveless Valentines Day, if you felt it aided in your art? Or is Valentines Day the sort of thing that feeds your art too much to be abolished for even one year?
Do you have an understanding of what it means to be truly alone in the world as an essential ingredient in making a truthful and moving piece of art?
Do you like being in solitude as meditation to art or do you need the support and love of another?
Do you know a difference between sadness and solitude?
But if loneliness does inspire your art; if you pour all your creative energies into amplifying your loneliness, methinks you are in a mind frame that will ensure you continue to be lonesome into the future. Good art should not require that.
2. Good art is like good acting… it's better if the emotion is behind it. Any emotion can be poured into art. Joy, pain, desperation, peace. If you are truly lonely, it naturally follows that you will be better at expressing that emotion in art.
3. To me it doesn't really matter, but I prefer the peace of solitude that comes with no distractions.
4. Solitude can be the most peaceful place of all, if you are happy within yourself.
deviantART muro drawing
I feel like my mind is flowing, instead of that knotted up feeling I had before I read this.
For that, you've got my thanks