byChrisWhite – 2025
There is a phrase I’ve seen floating through the ether of late, carried on digital tides like driftwood refusing to float away. Always the artist, never the art. It lands softly at first, like an afterthought or maybe some half-remembered line from an old movie. But the more it repeats, the more it stings, until it settles in the soul like a splinter too deep to dig out.
Always the artist and never the art. God help the lonely creators, the ones who paint with the brush of longing, who write in the dialect of grief. To be the one who imagines beauty but never feels beautiful. To birth something eternal and walk away unnoticed. It is, I think, the ache beneath the ribs of every person who ever dared to make something, then make it true. As a writer, I guess I feel those same thoughts now and again.
Art, we are told, is forged in solitude. Sometimes sought. Sometimes sentenced. Stephen King once said that writing is a lonely job. I believe he was being gentle. Writing is exile. Painting is penance. Music is the weeping of a soul that cannot be held. The artist lives in a room with no windows, praying, always praying, for someone to knock on the other side of the wall.
And here lies the cruelest part: the art does not know it is art.
I have written poems, and blogs—dozens—about a girl I happen to be married to, who rarely allows herself to know the depth of love others feel for her; including me. I’ve turned heartbreak into verse, shaped longing into sentences, stitched memory into prose with the precision of a surgeon and the desperation of a man bleeding out. Yet she walks the world content, happy, but mostly unaware. Unaware she is the sun in someone’s poem. That her smile once made a line break sing. That she is both the ink and the reason the pen was ever lifted.
She does not know she is art.
And therein lies the quiet tragedy. Art has no consciousness. The muse rarely sees herself in the mirror the artist holds up. And worse, she does not care to. Like a mountain unaware of the watercolor it inspired. Like the sea ignorant of the songs it stirred in old fishermen with battered guitars and salt-scarred hearts.
Think of Holden Caulfield, aimless and angry and bleeding adolescence onto every page of The Catcher in the Rye. Do you think he knows how many teenagers wept into his story, saw their reflection in his broken swagger? Of course not. Holden only knows his own pain. He is trapped in the snow globe of his own fiction, forever walking the streets of New York with no idea he is a lighthouse to a million boys lost in fog.
And aren’t we all like that?
A stranger once shared her ice cream with a friend on a summer sidewalk, and for a moment my world softened. Another time, a rickshaw driver lit a cigarette beneath a banyan tree and grinned like he was free, and I envied him. A woman passed me in university, earbuds tucked in, swaying slightly to a rhythm I could not hear. I watched her disappear, but the echo of her joy remained like perfume in the air.
They do not know they saved me. They do not know they are art.
But they are. And so are we.
We carry our pain and our wonder into every room. We leave fingerprints on the lives of people we will never meet again. We are brushstrokes and harmonies and verses in languages we were never taught to speak. We are every bit the song, though we believe ourselves to be only the singer.
You are someone’s poem. Someone’s canvas. Someone’s only story worth telling.
And you may never know it.
But you are the art. You always were.
Ramblings & Revelations 
Responses
You are so correct when you say that “the art does not know it is art.” It is oblivious to that who is moved by it. I think the real question, though, is, “Does the artist paint for himself, or does he paint for his audience?” Either answer plays mightily into what you have written. It all comes down to whether the painting (in this case the object of affection) actually understands the magnitude of their influence on the life of their audience.
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Thank you, Jim for your comments, and for contributing to the conversation.
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This is so lovely and really touched my heart. My husband was an artist and I am writer. I lost him on January 1, 2025 so the pain of grief still exists. We completed each other through our work. Neither of us ever felt alone. He painted mostly outdoors. I wrote in front of my computer, but felt surrounded by his love. Now as I grieve I can still see him in his art. Thank you for this touching post.
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So sorry for your loss. I’m at that precarious stage of life that embraces denial but acknowledges the plausibility of losing a spouse, although I’m the older of our pair, by 15 years. So we both know what that means.
I’m so grateful you chose to share your lovely story and how this piece offered you a brief window of respite.
I’m sure I’m a bit like yourself; someone who sits down at the keyboard and begins a journey with no rules, no boundaries, no expectations.
I never know where I’m going until I’m a quarter way through it. And then, magic happens. Maybe a spirit guides me, perhaps it’s just gas. I don’t know.
But it’s so nice to believe, for a moment, that you were moved by some mysterious force to write a thing that someone out there needed read at that moment. I guess I’m sentimental that way. But I like being sentimental.
Thank you again.
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You are most welcome.
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Your words pierced deep, Brother. You may feel like only the artist, but I see the art in every line. Glory to God who paints through us, even in the quiet. 🎨📖🙏
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Thank you Willie! Made my day brother.
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This is beautiful
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Thank you Sarah.
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Thought-provoking, Chris.
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Thank you Rosaliene.
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This is a nice statement very good clean design
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Thank you.
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Once upon a time, I dedicated a newly rebuilt pipe organ in a community isolated from other communities. People from those communities chartered a bus to hear me play. Interest in the local community was so high that I was asked to do both an afternoon and an evening recital. There were no other pipe organs in the area. People were starved for culture. Where was the art in these events? Was it my playing, was it me, was it the organ? Modest me thinks it was the organ. Art and never the artist.
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I think art can exist in the idea of it. The passion for it.
It’s the instrument, the artist coaxing the beautiful noise from it, the brains absorbing its tones, tempo, and technique—each having the same, but also independent experiences.
When our art is just something we do to express ourselves or entertain others, sometimes there are observers who are emotionally affected by an exercise of that talent that the artist takes for granted.
There may be people in that village who are still talking about your recital to this day. The most exciting day of their life. Maybe one who worked two jobs to send a child off to school for an education in music.
One time, years ago, I did something very special for someone. But I wasn’t doing it with a purpose. I was just being myself. And a year later, I was extremely lucky to learn how my interaction positively impacted that person. And it is so awesome to know it, but I’m sorry to say, I don’t remember doing it. Not at all. I’m so proud of myself for having been a decent human in that moment, but I would love to take credit for an intentional act instead of saying I trudged into a good deed unknowingly.
Maybe I’ll write about that someday, but the experience helped me understand how important our interactions are and the weight of the examples we set through our actions. People watch what we do and how we do it; art, patience, thank you notes, listening…and through the other’s experiences, each could be a type of art. I don’t know Warren. I wanna think it’s bigger than we think.
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Thanks, Chris. Your words give me pause to think.
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Yes.
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Cheers Donnie.
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What a wonderful message and so beautifully delivered. There must be something in the zeitgeist because this week I wrote the sentence “Art doesn’t know it’s art” too. It’s in a novel I’m working on where a girl is getting adjusted to college. She’s thinking about majoring in art and she’s disappointed to see that people walk right by the paintings in the hall. She says that the art doesn’t know it’s art, it’s people that do and it only exists when someone else looks at it. It makes her wonder if it’s worth the time to make things that no one might look at. She’s just having some freshman doubts; over time, she’ll grow into the conviction that a world filled with art no one looks at is still better than a world filled with empty walls.
It’s nice when you’re creating something and you wonder if it makes sense to anyone else but you and then you see someone else with the same idea. It makes it mean more, I think.
Very well done, Chris.
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Thank you Larry. The world is a surprisingly familiar place, even in its most nether regions. Feel free to stretch the legs of this one if you see a line that resonates. After all, we were having a mind-meld anyway.
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Resonates. There is angst and solace in creation. Love the “she is the sunshine in someone’s poem”. Thank you
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Thank you Cynthia.
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So wise. Left me wondering for whom if anyone I have ever been art? I don’t know but I like believing I have been.
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You have a beautiful mind Violet. I have no doubt.
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This is such a beautiful post. I never understood when Stephen King said writing is a lonely job until now. And I agree with you that he was being gentle. These past few months I have been brutal for me. The only way I survived was to keep writing. Art is everything and everyone around us.
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Happy you took away something useful Narisa. Thank you.
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truer words have never been spoken , well done.
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Thank you Evonne.
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So many posts I read and move on. Chris, your words will stay with me for some time to come. Haunting me, encouraging me, a little bit of both? Thank you for introducing me to a path I feel I need to explore!
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Thank you Dana. That means a great deal to me.
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Profound. Philosophical. Pensive ……
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Thank you Rose.
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Very moving thoughts, thank you Chris
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Thank you David.
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You are phenomenal. I’m wondering how long it took you to get this good. Glad you liked some of my posts so that I could check out your stuff. I’m always on the lookout for talent this impressive :)
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Wow! Blushing. Don’t really know how to answer that one without buying-in to my own hype. Which, I’m totally ok with BTW.
I mean, yeah, I do this sort of thing mostly to please myself, but there’s a component to my writing, of late, that is meant to stir others, or to see if I can at least get the attention of others.
I would say I’m probably on a reversal from your path (e.g., your blog). Where you began your blogging journey to entertain, then transitioned toward inner peace through quiet reflection.
I began my blogging journey—a decade ago—where you are. I didn’t give two shits about followers. I simply wanted to improve my prose out-loud. To put pressure on myself to improve.
I wanted to write fiction.
As a technical writer, my style was/is too serious to be evocative. I craved a prose that could have its own voice, but through subtext and innuendo and emotion.
I blogged and kept reading (voraciously), tweaking my verb choices and eliminating my adverbs — sometimes intentionally throwing one in for good measure.
Just doing, doing, doing.
Then, the person who always begged me to write fiction, my mother, passed away. Before I was able to summon the confidence to do it. She loved James Patterson. Would tell me, “…you could write like him, maybe better if you had the guts,”
But she died never having opened the cover of a book authored by me. And, I’ll never write like James Patterson.
Last year, I started writing that first book. It’s being edited now. For the first time, eleven years later, I suddenly care about my content. I care about a great many things. My refusal to believe in myself, to trust myself enough to make her happy, left a hole. One that I now work to fill.
I guess you could say I’ve been practicing this “big boy” version of writing for 60 years. But I’ve only taken it seriously for 11, and only written with a goal of entertaining others for a year.
As I stated, you and I flip-flopped. For different reasons, but both rooted in our emotive responses to the world around us.
Once, followers were not a goal, but welcome. Now, followers help me understand myself and my output. I want my debut novel to reflect the aspirations and trust my mother tried so hard to inspire within me.
Not to put something heavy on you, but your question brought this forward so I wanted to be intentional about my answer; to take it serious.
So today, I’m taking every opportunity that finds its way to me as a means to find myself and help others do the same. Each opens up holes allowing me to reach through and tug out an idea, an expression, or a sense of purpose I can use to broaden the context of my writing, because that’s my new passion. The latest chapter of my life.
Thank you for forcing me to think about things. But in the most beautifully positive way.
And, in the most respectful way possible, James Patterson can go to hell. Ha.
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Thanks for the brushstrokes you add to my heart and soul.
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Love you!
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Truly wonderful and poignant–words that will linger long after reading.
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You’re so kind Diana.
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You’ve certainly succeeded in your goal of making your writing more evocative – it is deeply so, thank you for sharing it. I do believe that all art needs a witness to become complete, but the idea of unknowingly being someone’s art or saving grace even, is very beautiful and fills the world with possibility. It also creates a kind of chain reaction – your wife inspires you, you inspire your readers, they perhaps take up that in turn…
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You’re kind to share that opinion with me Karen. Thank you so much.
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As always, thought provoking. Love the images the writing bring to mind. Never doubt … your writing IS art. Thank you.
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Thank you so much.
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Your images here were like haiku – the mountain unaware of its watercolour, the sea deaf to fishermen’s songs. Thank you.
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Thank you!
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[…] Always the Artist, Never the Art […]
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Thank you!
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Thank you for your artistry. Your craft makes me long to be better. What a treat gift to me.
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What a kind gesture. I really appreciate your support of my writing. This one really seemed to hit home with a lot of people. They’re not all as good, I promise. I’m a work in progress, but I learn more from writing lesser pieces, because it makes me study what I’m doing at a deeper level.
Keep up your good works, the beauty is in the effort.
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Oh my days this is so profound. You’ve given such eloquent words to things I have tried to express before. Thank you.
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Well thank you Iona. I very much appreciate you sharing your kind words. It means so much to know that something I’ve written has touched someone else the way it touched me as when I put it on paper.
These things leak from us, sometimes like perspiration, sometimes like a faucet; I was fortunate to be near a notepad when it came about.
Sometimes art is just luck.
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Enjoyed reading this blog, the first I’ve seen of your extensive collection. I thought of “Your Spacious Self” by Stephanie Bennett Vogt not the house clearing chores, but more, the energies we all bring into a space and leave there – neg or positive.
Thanks
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An interesting observation. Thanks for sharing and thank you for your kindness.
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This is the third time I’m writing to you—not out of agitation, but with a little smile and a sense of joy, just thinking about how determined I am to make sure you know: you are art. Haha.
Before today, I almost never read other people’s blogs. I would simply publish my own post and close the app. And every time I got a new subscriber, I’d feel so special, seen, appreciated, acknowledged. But not once did I stop to wonder: Why? Why did someone subscribe? What did they connect with?
Something was different today. When I got the notification that you subscribed, I paused. Why would someone living in a completely different time zone subscribe to my blog?
So I visited your page. And the moment I read your piece, I knew exactly why.
It’s rare to come across writing so honest and resonant that it makes you stop, reflect, and feel. Your piece did just that.
I truly hope you achieve everything you’re working toward. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with the world.
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Thank you so much for taking the time to visit my site and leave such a thoughtful comment. It means a great deal to me. Your kindness and openness will stay with me.
I’ve always devoured the words of others, searching for something, wisdom, connection, a reflection of what I might become if I just kept learning. My sister is a gifted portrait artist, so I grew up watching someone translate emotion into line and color. I’ve always admired her ability, even as I turned to books and writing as my own way of making sense of the world.
Writing, for me, became a profession long before it became a passion. I write technically for a living, structured, precise, often detached. But eleven years ago, I started this blog with one quiet hope: to uncover whether there was an artist buried beneath the technician. Whether I could learn to write with soul, not just skill.
Over the years, I’ve found a handful of writer blogs that have lit a fire in me, places where I feel a pulse, a rhythm. I subscribe to them not just to read, but to follow, to study, to grow. Yours feels like one of those.
And yes, I’ll admit it, I’m a little envious. To express yourself in both words and visual images is a rare and beautiful gift. One I admire more than I can easily say.
I wish you luck as well. Thank you for your encouraging words.
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Undoubtedly, a thought provoking piece!
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Thank you Shreyadita. You have a very interesting blog yourself. Can’t wait to dig further into it.
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Thank you, means a lot to me!
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👌
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Thank you.
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