What’s a Masterpiece to a writer who’s pen is running on empty or to an artist who’s palette is dried and withered? How can one create a work of art when all artistic inspiration is lost or tossed aside to the reality of a hard knock life?
Writing your pain or poetically defining your struggle stanza after stanza rhyme after rhyme with each verse more damning than the last. Painting a portrait that critics stand and stare at creating their own artistic definition of what the artist could have meant when they are in fact ignorant to its true meaning. Is this what you call a Masterpiece of tremendous proportions? Strumming your heart out until the chords sound just right, until your fingers bleed and there is nothing left but tears on the shiny wood of a pain bearing guitar. How many pirouettes can dancer do before spinning herself into insanity from trying to compose the perfect Masterpiece?
When creative expression is suppressed by 9-5 jobs, school requirements, bills or by society’s own definition of a Masterpiece, what does an artist do? Conform to all written rules of formal American literature writing with perfect diction and syntax? Following every grammatical rule in the English handbook, remaining on the given topic, or making sure every line rhymes harboring your freedom of free verse expression? That’s what you learned in every writing class: follow the rules and your work will be a Masterpiece. Which means, if you follow the rules, you’ll create an exemplary Masterpiece according to their standards. But that is life. You follow the rules.
Go to school, pay attention in class, listen to your teacher, do your assignments on time, pass every test and then you will graduate, go to a good college, get a degree and land your awesomely boring 9-5 job you’ve always dreamed about. This is what the rules are. This is supposed to be your Masterpiece. Color inside the lines, don’t make up new rules as you go along, play the notes that are in front of you. All instructions on creating a Masterpiece. But is it your Masterpiece or yours?
What’s a Masterpiece to a writer who’s pen inks out everything that it is supposed to? To an artist who is told art is just a hobby? To a musician who is told what sheet music to follow? To a dancer who strives for perfection in the eyes of others?
Its a blank canvas mirroring the Masterpiece of pre-determined destinies with just enough room to artistically sign your name in anguished acceptance.
So a writer will continue to write objectively and subjectively as told by the rules. An artist will allow their palette to wither and dry as they sit in their office cubicles. A musician will keep playing the sheet music they were instructed to play. The dancer will continuously pirouette her way into the insanity of perfection until someone tells her that she is good enough. All in the efforts to create a Masterpiece.
