Don't Stop

Creating art and telling a story are much the same thing. Both need imagination to tell of an idea. Art tells stories, and carefully crafted stories are pieces of art. Often, I limit art to sketches and paintings and computer graphics, and telling a story to a voice and words on a page and movies but they are much more.

Jason Sandberg is a supervisor at a printing company who fell in love with art and storytelling. It happened when he was six years old, holding a Jack Kirby comic that seemed to have come to life. Now, on top of his 'day job', Sandberg pursues art. "I'd like to create art full-time," Sandberg says, "the mix of children's books and paintings should prevent me from getting into a rut."

Sandberg's impressionistic art gives him "a sense of delight and discovery, an opportunity to ponder why the non-real can cause an aesthetic response," while his realistic paintings give him "month-long ice-cream headaches, but I feel stronger at the end." Through it all, Sandberg hasn't forgotten what it is like to be a child in love with art.

When his young daughter showed a fascinated interest in his paintings, he jumped at the change to do a painting with her. It turned into an annual tradition that will serve, as Sandberg says, as "a yearly time-capsule".

Sandberg's paintings tell part of a story. They do not use words, but they do not need to. And yet, he "had the desire to create beyond the moments depicted in the paintings. I wanted to depict a beginning, middle and end." This drove him to picture books-- picture after picture, paired with words, to tell a whole story. That, my friends, is art.

He said, " I have come to the conclusion that the act of making art can't make someone an artist. What makes someone an artist is the inability to not make art, and discouragement or support can't affect that."

That said, maybe you write novels, compose poetry, create youtube videos, paint, sketch, write music, or something else entirely... if you can't seem to stop, you just might be an artist.