How to Do Art, by Paolo Cornacchia

Both Members of this Club, by George Bellows (USA), 1909.

How to Do Art

In other words, don’t let it do you.

By which we mean we are as much a part of ourselves as art is to itself.

Notwithstanding the psychological realm — the realm with much to say about nothing at all.

Take the artist on a painfully inartful day—the morning is cloudy but the afternoon is sunny, naturellement, the mailman arriving at 1:15pm before the recycling (sundry cans and bottles, crumpled cardboard pieces) endeavours to be disposed of, evacuated into a urine-coloured, unprepossessing vat next to the more prominent but filthier receptacle whose plastic lids have been disabused of their function (spring, summer, fall and winter), the weather given its full and
natural right to subsume the banal and odourific contents therein.

Still, there is much toiling to be done. There is the afternoon that wanes—painful reminder of the blinding transience of life.

But at the end of it all, do we dare believe? Has that narrative that had defined our lives been finally subsumed? Do we assume that we are to be bestowed entry into THE GRAND SOCIETY OF INFINITE ACCOLADES?

No (the very word that we have been tasked to elude).

Dinnertime. The producing of dinner can be thought of as art, of course, as food is nearly always relied upon as being the substrate to consciousness. Moreover, the term “culinary arts” has repeatedly been seared into the dogma of our digestive existence.

Chicken cutlets, one evening.

Linguine with sautéed vegetables, the next.

As we muster the undead.

Paolo Cornacchia

Paolo Cornacchia lives along the shores of the Chesapeake. He has previously been published in Literary Orphans. More information about him can be found here:http://paolocornacchia.space