The Soloist

Art is magic.  In the practiced hand, things appear and disappear like a firefly or flash paper.  Whether a trick of nature or of the hand, there is a grace in the moment.  That grace is a love, a yearning we all share and seek.  A moment of awe or inspiration to greatness.  An artist can stretch those moments, excluding the rest of the world, and find that grace is not a fleeting thing but a place in which to dwell.  Outside of that place is a living hell, beyond the understanding of others or their capacity to stay within the moment that an artist offers up as a gift.  Outside that grace becomes overwhelming and consuming, whittling away at the solace, the awe, chipping away the edges until grace is a postage stamp with darkness all around.  For the artist, finding a way back to grace can be difficult.  Forced to concede to outside forces, the din of others waiting for a trickle from the once unfettered flow of magic, the artist balances upon the precipice of sanity.  There was time in practice and a place for the magic, and now, all that is gone.  Gone to what others see as the important features of the slow drudgery and eventual buy into a moment of grace, of magic.  Some struggle with this reality, falling prey to the same belief in a moment, leaving a state of grace for a corner of the market or a niche in their craft.  Then there are those who struggle with finding a balance, one foot in and the other out, faining a belief that being half in one world and half in the other offers the best solution.  Finally, there are those who cannot survive outside that grace, understanding that this world will only allow moments to  be bought and sold, magic as a commodity not of grace but of commerce.  This is the most damning of understandings, the most fatal of realities, knowing that when the hands cease, their magic, that grace is pulled out from under you.  What a horrible existence.  The artist copes in their own way within each model, finding a way to live or not, deciding moment to moment, waiting for a state of grace.