When I watch my friend Diane Dennis practice gilding, a highly delicate operation that requires gentle yet precise skills and specific tools from agate burnishers to leather burnishing pads, to a lifting brush made of a single line of squirrel hairs, I am watching an artist at work. Her knowledge of the process, her hours, and weeks, and years spent mastering the craft, her own sensibilities about what is beautiful, and finally her ability to make her inner vision manifest in the world have earned her the right to the “artist” title.

    Knowing what it takes to earn the artist appellation honestly, I get all riled up when I hear the term “inner artist” bandied about. There’s no such thing as an “inner artist”. You’re either an outer artist, or you’re not an artist at all. To be an artist takes practice, practice, practice, and skill, skill, skill. After all, there’s no such thing as an inner Dentist, or, if there were, we wouldn’t really care to see him practice, at least not on our own teeth. There’s not even such a thing as an inner chef, we cook or we don’t, don’t we? Yet why is it that every single man, woman, and child that ever walked upon the earth has an inner artist just waiting to get out? Sure, standing right next to the inner nuclear physicist, inner attorney, and inner journalist.

    Look, to be positive, I think the urge stems, at least in part, from a shared desire by those who are not only not practicing artists, but not even particularly creative on a daily basis,  to reclaim a part of themselves they’ve lost touch with—the creative part, the expressive part.

    Fair enough, but then enough with the inner artist nonsense. Time to pick up a pen, or a pencil, or a brush, and, dare I say it, take a class and learn how to do something creative—take a photograph, make an etching, throw a pot, and  with some dedication and skill, begin to bring that inner artist out.