Eccentricity is a scent of art.

 Eccentricity is a scent of art

To be unique is to be authentic. To be unique is to try in vain with goodwill to be like everyone else without ever achieving it. It is trying to conform to the norms accepted by society without ever feeling at home. All true talent, all profound intuition are unique and authentic in their content and also in their form. It is not likely the same in the way they appear, thinking of  Diogenes of Sinop who walked the streets in the middle of the day with a lamp illuminating the faces of his fellow citizens because he was looking for man, like Bob Marley who had let this hair grow into dreadlocks, stating that his hair was his identity or like Keith Moss, the champion of both behavioural and behavioural quirks or even more like Nicolas Tesla who would not enter a building unless he had turned three time around it… Art is the domain where the unique authenticity of the artists expresses itself with even more colours and flavours to the point that artists are seen as eccentric beings. Eccentricity is the other side of talent. It is its other face always half-discovered. There is no talent without a means of expression.

Every talent wants and seeks to express itself, in the same way that the nature of all light is to enlighten. Art unlike a lot of disciplines is the one that feeds on its subject while letting the subject flourishes. The subject-object relationship is very different than the one that is maintained in other disciplines. As artists, we are both subject and object of the art that we express. If the talent can be expressed in terms of light, or moreover like a candle, the artists burn their wax by letting the art express itself through them. The light that passes through the artists by the means of the talent that they express, consumes them at the same time.  We are not poets because we are writing poetry. We are poets because poetry expresses itself through us. We are not musicians because we can write music or sing. We are musicians because everything in us has a rhythm and musical note. We are musical beings. The music we produce is the music that surrounds us and makes us. We are not painters because we paint, but because the whole universe is for us a source of inspirations and infinite productions.

To say it with Heidegger terms; “we become what we are” To be and to become fully the artist who sleeps within us, is to be ourselves in an authentic way. It is to be unique.  It is precisely this mode of existence that often stands in opposition with the social norms, conventions, half-measures, which at first glance allows artists to appear as marginal beings, as eccentric beings. The aim of all artistic life is not to reach the summits of eccentricity, but the true communication of inspiration that is seen under canvas, under  music, under sculptures under poems. If it is true that we are not equal in front of talent, it is also true that we do not react the same way when it comes to its expression. The heart of every artist is a vulnerable heart. The life of an artist is vulnerable to life, vulnerable to the light, to the beauty, to the time and especially to all that manifests itself through him. Yet  the artist is trying to express what comes through him with his strength of character, with the means of the art that he  endowed. There is only one certainty that the expression of talent does not leave an artist unchanged.  In the light of poetry, the exercise of talent is tantamount to whispering between words; to write is to listen.

There is meaning in words.  But words expressed are no more innocent, because they always come through a medium. They are never alone, never without intentions. They are ways and paths to someone, to something.  Like water they need a container. Like a guest they need to be hosted. It is the vase which contaminates the words. It is the host who makes the stay a desirable one. But writing while listening to words only, to what wants  to be expressed only, it is to put ourselves, as the medium, in the background without ever disappearing. It is to forget our egos within the way of words. Writing poetry then is tearing the blissful tranquility of appearances. It is to find the heart and intimacy of things, of life, in a moment that I call eternity. Eternity is not a time without end, but is with what we fill  our moments in the horizon of time. We can never fully hear the voices that call for eternity within us. it is only whispered, only folded into life, into daily worries, into daily deeds.

Awaiting us to unfold the meaning. Meanings waiting to be said, to be revealed, to be drawn. Art is a profound transformation of oneself, a profound work of deepening the meaning of life that is not always very obvious for everyone and even often for the artist themselves, as if we were undergoing our art rather than living it fully and assuming it.  We do not always write, always carve everything we want, but something in us forces our gaze to see, our hand to write, our brush to draw.  That thing is not just the work we do, but the person we become. We do not need to understand in advance our art to execute it, but to adequately prepare ourselves for its accomplishment.

Unlike many other professions, being an artist is a permanent and irreversible state. The inspiration does not know of holidays, nor of retreats…We must live with this state of things and all that we cannot express through art comes to be imposed permanently in our daily life as a reminder of the work that continues without our knowledge. Nature is incredibly effective and therefore under the eccentric auspices of artists, it is always the art that continues to express itself.  Art is the dimension of the universe that science cannot contain in theorems and axioms that gives itself to us as a sensibility of infinite complexity and intelligence. The artists who express it are profoundly altered and changed by the energy that emerges from it. The overflow that they cannot express through their art is expressed through their person because people do not understand the stakes and struggles that they endure and interpret wrongly this expression rich in colour and flavour of their person as being of the eccentricity. If they knew how much art was there, they would look at the artists differently.  Eccentricity is an expression of all artistic beauty. It does not mean that in order to be an artist, one must become eccentric, but only that eccentricity is part of the beautiful expression of art. Because we are not equal regarding talent, so we do not all react in the same way. Some eccentricities are for all to see and very loud, others are just subtle in the refined way of being oneself.