Why Do We Write Our Names in the Sand?

There’s a weird amount of art in the world.

I have walls full of paintings, shelves just for books, rooms with TVs telling stories, music filling every opportunity for silence, and infinitely more online. It’s relentless.

Every second, someone wants me to know about their romances, losses, and adventures. It’s shameless. But at the same time, it’s beautiful.

What’s with all these sounds, scribbles, and stories? Why do we make art?

Rick Rubin says art is an opportunity to make our lives bigger than just a short moment on Earth. It’s our way of transcending life.

By conventional definition, the purpose of art is to create physical and digital artifacts. To fill shelves with pottery, books, and records.

Though artists generally aren’t aware of it, that end work is a by-product of a greater desire. We aren’t creating to produce or sell material products. The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm. A longing to transcend.

What we create allows us to share glimpses of an inner landscape, one that is beyond our understanding. Art is our portal to the unseen world.

_{Rick Rubin, The Creative Act (2023)}

He adds that in our temporary life, art is a way of saying, “I was here.”

Art is a reverberation of an impermanent life. As human beings, we come and go quickly, and we get to make works that stand as monuments to our time here. Enduring affirmations of existence.

Michelangelo’s David, the first cave paintings, a child’s finger-paint landscapes—they all echo the same human cry, like graffiti scrawled in a bathroom stall: I was here.

_{Rick Rubin, The Creative Act (2023)}

Another reason is that art makes us feel less isolated.

Rubin says that art allows us to use human experience as a language to connect with people anywhere throughout time.

When you contribute your point of view to the world, others can see it. It’s refracted through their filter and distributed again. This process is continuous and ongoing. Taken all together, it creates what we experience as reality.

Every work, no matter how trivial it may seem, plays a role in this greater cycle. The world continually unfolds. Nature renews itself. Art evolves. Each of us has our own way of seeing this world. And this can lead to feelings of isolation.

Art has an ability to connect us beyond the limitations of language. Through this, we get to face our inner world outward, remove the boundaries of separation, and participate in the great remembering of what we came into this life knowing: There is no separation. We are one. The reason we’re alive is to express ourselves in the world. And creating art may be the most effective and beautiful method of doing so. Art goes beyond language, beyond lives. It’s a universal way to send messages between each other and through time.

_{Rick Rubin, The Creative Act (2023)}

As Ben Folds wrote, we have a need to know that others feel what we feel.

As we speed past moments in a day, we want to give form to what we feel, what was obvious but got lost in the shuffle. We want to know that someone else noticed that shape we suspected was hovering just beyond our periphery. And we want that shape, that flicker of shared life experience, captured in a bottle, playing up on a big screen, gracing our living room wall, or singing to us from a speaker. It reminds us where we have been, what we have felt, who we are, and why we are here.

_{Ben Folds, A Dream About Lightning Bugs (2019)}

We also create art because we don’t have a choice. Rubin describes this as a force that pulls art out of us.

As you deepen your participation in the creative act, you may come across a paradox. Ultimately, the act of self-expression isn’t really about you.

Most who choose the artist’s path don’t have a choice. We feel compelled to engage, as if by some primal instinct, the same force that calls turtles toward the sea after hatching in the sand. We follow this instinct. To deny it is dispiriting, as if we are in violation of nature. If we zoom out, we see this blind impulse is always there, guiding our aim beyond ourselves. In the moment when we feel the work is taking shape, there’s a dynamic surge, followed by an urge to share, in the hopes of replicating that mysterious emotional charge in others. This is the call to self-express, our creative purpose.

_{Rick Rubin, The Creative Act (2023)}

Ivan Brunetti describes the force as being so strong he’ll do anything to make art.

I often think that, were my arms to be cut off in some tragic accident, I would still feel compelled to scrape my gums against the sidewalk in order to create a comic strip with my own blood.

_{Ivan Brunetti, Cartooning (2007)}

We’re all naturally artists. We start drawing the second we can hold a pencil. We have to tell the world who we are. That’s why we make art. That’s why we write our names in the sand.

It doesn’t matter that just as fast as the waves wash away my name, my existence will be washed away from Earth because, at least for a moment, people knew Treat was here.

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