Artists of the Soul - Rabbi Yaakov Asher Sinclair

all of us experience moments of poetry they may come from events in our personal lives the reuniting of long lost family a birth a death or these moments of inspiration May spring from this world of teeming Splendor from our sense of joy and wonder at the creation some of us however are not content to leave these moments of inspiration and the real of the intangible we feel the need to give them a physical existence in words in song in paint or as a photograph and once we've made this commitment there comes the difficult and frustrating process of wrestling with the materials of the artist art is inspiration wrestling with constriction the constriction of the physical doing battle with the idea for in whichever medium I may choose to clothe my inspiration I must struggle with characteristics and the limitations of that Medium be it oil paint goash or photoshop after all I'm trying to coax something beyond the physical to live within the physical however without this struggle there is no art the mind can dance but it has no dancing partner art exists because of constriction not in spite of it that dance of the mind and the spirit with paper and paint that Exquisite tension between the material and the the ephemeral is where art lives and breathes and just as in music where a flute can only produce a tune by the constriction of breath through a metal pipe and without that constriction that limitation there is no music so painting and photography rely on the celebration of limits and ironically the more constricting the medium the more poetic the product to this day black and white photographs limited to different Shades of Gray are seems more artistic than less limited color photographs and photographs themselves are considered less artistically worthy than painting because they're closer to reality and less restricted by the medium in the image of God he created him man the fact that God created us in His image means that man's ability to create the ability to take the material world and make it speak the language of emotion must be the most distant reflection of some characteristic of God Jewish mystical sources teach that when God created the universe he constricted himself so to speak to allow the appearance of something other than himself this mystical concept is called simum literally constriction in other words we could say that this world and everything in it is God's work of art that God constricted himself so to speak to allow the existence of the universe the spiritual Masters understood the deeper meaning of the phrase a kenu there's no Rock like our God to be a k there is no artist like God interesting the word artist in Hebrew is related to the word tar which means narrow or constricted My Life as a Jew is brimful of constrictions and restrictions but it is these very restrictions that lets me turn this world into art they are the tools of the artists of the Soul [Music]