On the Disappearance of the Artist

November 2020 

There is a moment, perhaps no longer than a breath held too long, when the hand moves and the self is gone. Not asleep, not watching—simply gone. The paint flows or the sentence curls forward and there is no longer a painter, no longer a writer—only the act itself, proceeding without permission. It is in that silence, that vanishing, that something pure begins.

The mistake is always to want something from it. Applause. Immortality. Even meaning. All these arrive too late, and usually when the act has already died and become artifact. The world claps for a product, never the disappearance that birthed it. And so the artist is tempted to reverse the process, begin with the product in mind, measure each stroke against reception. But the moment one begins to look over one’s own shoulder, the work becomes stiff with intention.

Children, drunks, and saints seem to understand. They do not pause to justify their gestures. They do not revise for approval. Their motions are often ugly, unfinished, misunderstood, but they are alive, and they do not come back to explain themselves.

Somewhere along the way, the cultivated adult learns to fear that kind of surrender. We call it madness, or worse, mediocrity. So we retreat behind our mirrors and polish the mask. We make the art about ourselves. Our ambition. Our image. Our cause. But art, when it is honest, cares nothing for the self. It demands its dissolution. It punishes the one who clings.

There is a kind of creation that begins not with mastery, but with the failure of control. It is not a triumph but a vanishing. The best artists know this, though they rarely say it aloud. Perhaps because it is unspeakable. Or perhaps because to speak of it is to reappear.

And once you reappear, it’s already too late.