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My Medēn Art Project

January 10, 2022

art, artist, experiencing, experimental, Greece, literature, Medēn Art Project, poetry

The beauty of art – true art, where you simply don’t care about marketing, audience reception (or even intended audience), and the like – is that the artist can reach realms of unimaginable freedom. My Medēn art project is such an artistic work. It’s still in progress, and it will never finish – a project such as Medēn can never finish.

But that’s not the only peculiarity about it, as you’ll soon discover.

Part of true, liberated art, is that the artist can choose what to share, when, and in which shape. Should art be free? Should it be sense-making? Maybe true meaning is only sense-making when it doesn’t make immediate sense.

In any case, I’ve decided it’s time to turn on the faucet, allowing some colorful water to trickle down the canvas.

Stream-of-consciousness? Conceptual fusion? Perhaps no more (or less) than an experiment. Medēn is here and now, and yet it’s always been. Medēn is what it is, ultimately; we all are.

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Tortured Artists: Is Suffering Necessary for a Fiction Writer?

April 12, 2021

Society, Writing

art, artist, mediocrity, society, suffering

Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Ernest Hemingway. Troubled souls, phenomenal artists. The idea of tortured artists is a sort of a trope or stereotype that wants great artists – writers, painters, musicians – to be constantly frustrated or even self-destructing. But is suffering necessary for a fiction writer? Can “normal” people be exceptional artists?

The truth is, I don’t know. That’s also one reason I’m phrasing the title of this post as a question mark. Based on purely historical precedence, we can draw the following two conclusions regarding tortured artists:

Not all tortured souls become exceptional artists.
Not all exceptional artists are tortured souls.

In other words, I’d say we can’t really reach any safe conclusion regarding tortured artists. What I believe we can do – and it’s the reason this post exists – is attempt to answer the more modest question: Can “normal” people be exceptional artists?

The lessons from this attempt can be very important indeed, because they can let us see the ingredients of a great fiction writer.

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How to Gauge Your Writing Skills

November 30, 2020

Writing

art, artist, author, fiction, progress, writing

Self-reflection isn’t easy, as humans have a tendency for confirmation bias. To put it bluntly, it’s easier to believe in a comforting lie than to face an ugly truth. Writers are no exception – indeed, as we’ll see, in some sense they’re particularly vulnerable to self-deception, but probably not in the way you’d expect – and as a result they struggle to gauge their writing skills.

gauge writing skills — Gauging your writing skills is about understanding the fault lines between past and present

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