On being an artist - when art becomes who you are
I am going to try and explain what being an artist is like. I get asked regularly by people "how do I know if I am an artist?". Well - if you are asking that question, you are a creative person and that alone makes you an artist. But I'll add - you know you are an artist when you realise creation has quietly moved in and rearranged all of the furniture in your mind - and somehow everything feels more like home.
It starts with a gentle enchantment when you stop to look at trees, and then find yourself spellbound by the dapple of light and feel the symphony of growing things. You make a mental note of how to mix those greens. You stare at strangers for too long reading their features and marvelling at the story it would tell on canvas. When you try to sleep, your eyelids become a lantern show with colours that bloom and swirl, compositions arrange themselves with ochres and violets in paintings that you've never imagined as you drift off to sleep.
Not even your morning coffee is exempt from your artist's eye. Even the ordinary glows with potential as you adjust the angle of your cup to make the whole breakfast table sing with falling shadows, steam rising, and negative space that breathes. It's like conducting a tiny orchestra before you've even taken a sip.
When circumstances keep your hands still, you become addicted to visiting or watching others who make. You seek out their processes as if they are sacred breadcrumbs leading you into an enchanted forest. As you watch, your own hands remember, respond with phantom gestures as clay is moulded, pigment meets canvas, keeping the creative pulse alive even in stillness.
This is what is meant by "art choses you". Its not a mere practice or profession - its a fundamental shift in how you inhabit the world. It's an invisible obsession! Art has become the lens through which everything filters, it turns the mundane into magical, the overlooked into the marvellous. You wear it unconsciously, like the rhythm of a heartbeat - constant, vital, essential.
You know you are an artist when you have stopped distinguishing between living and creating, when observation itself becomes a form of devotion. When beauty ambushes you at the traffic lights, at the supermarket, when your inner artist eye never quite closes, when everything you see, touch, smell is constantly becoming art.
This is the artist's calling: to be forever chasing the light - the light on the water, the light in eyes, light that reveals form, mood, and transforms the ordinary into the marvellous. Artists serve as a translator, a witness, a light catcher attuned to the echo of light which makes all seeing possible.
Or you could disagree with everything I have written and search for the the short answer which is: you know you are an artist when someone else validates your work or when you sell your work. I prefer the long path, the one that teaches me to truly be me.
Either way, see you on top of the mountain
Judith Rose.