Art in a nutshell

It's about living your life as a never-ending process of exploration and discovery. Art is one way of doing that, one of the best, but even non-artists can do it when they put themselves in the right state of open-ended, non-grasping, detached awareness (what many meditative traditions call "seeing") and allow themselves to take in experience without filtering it, censoring it, judging it, or otherwise attaching themselves to it. (Even intellectual understanding is a block to this kind of "seeing." You need to break free of ideas and conceptions and categories as much as anything else.) Work to become a "seer" in this way in all of your experience. Work to become God's eyes and ears--half-inside, half-outside, tasting, relishing, savoring, loving, caressing everything around you (even what your mind tells you is evil or bad or wrong or stupid--which is why you have to break free of those categories too, thinking without thoughts, as I phrase it somewhere else).

That's ultimately what it is to be an artist. And the more you do it, experience after experience, hour after hour, life after life, the further you'll see and the more you'll understand and the more you'll be able to experience and the richer the experiences will be--and, if you are an artist, you'll be able to share your seeing and understanding and experiencing with others, to help them move farther along their own spiritual paths.

That was Ray Carney by the way. Not an artist per se, but definitely moving people and artists along their spiritual paths.