The Road Less Traveled
Originally Posted (Posted on 08-30-2010)
Almost everyone knows or is familiar with the poem by Robert Frost, The Road Less Traveled. If you are not, then I encourage you to do a search on the Internet and spend a few minutes reading the verses. It is a very powerful poem.
I am an artist. That is something I find that I have to remind my self of daily. Because I actually make a living in a different field, I am often distracted from the fact that I am an artist. That is how God made me and if I had been a more perceptive person with a stronger will than most around me when I was younger I would have entered a lifework that fulfilled that calling.
Today I am in my third 30 years. Just begun for sure but two 30 years have gone by and I am finally where I need to be, where I am called to be. But I still do not know what exactly is my road. Every accomplished and successful artist…did I say every?….no I do not mean that by any means. But, many of the accomplished and successful artists that I admire did find their road to travel on and their work represents that. For example, Sean Scully did find his road and spend a good amount of his creative time painting very large canvases with rectangles of color. Mark Rothko made his career with the most simplistic composition and the most wonderful use of color. Robert Thornton also followed a very familiar pattern in his paintings so that some would think he simply painted the same thing over and over again simply using different colors. Well, he did. So what? It was the road he traveled.
I am looking for my road. Sometimes I think I have found it to only later realize that I have not. But I am getting closer.
The biggest challenge to finding ones road as an artist is to fight the need to sell ones work to live. Because an artist must live to paint and lives to paint, the temptation to listen to the commercial sirens and paint what others say sells weighs heavily on the pursuit of the road we have been appointed or called to travel.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost
Almost everyone knows or is familiar with the poem by Robert Frost, The Road Less Traveled. If you are not, then I encourage you to do a search on the Internet and spend a few minutes reading the verses. It is a very powerful poem.
I am an artist. That is something I find that I have to remind my self of daily. Because I actually make a living in a different field, I am often distracted from the fact that I am an artist. That is how God made me and if I had been a more perceptive person with a stronger will than most around me when I was younger I would have entered a lifework that fulfilled that calling.
Today I am in my third 30 years. Just begun for sure but two 30 years have gone by and I am finally where I need to be, where I am called to be. But I still do not know what exactly is my road. Every accomplished and successful artist…did I say every?….no I do not mean that by any means. But, many of the accomplished and successful artists that I admire did find their road to travel on and their work represents that. For example, Sean Scully did find his road and spend a good amount of his creative time painting very large canvases with rectangles of color. Mark Rothko made his career with the most simplistic composition and the most wonderful use of color. Robert Thornton also followed a very familiar pattern in his paintings so that some would think he simply painted the same thing over and over again simply using different colors. Well, he did. So what? It was the road he traveled.
I am looking for my road. Sometimes I think I have found it to only later realize that I have not. But I am getting closer.
The biggest challenge to finding ones road as an artist is to fight the need to sell ones work to live. Because an artist must live to paint and lives to paint, the temptation to listen to the commercial sirens and paint what others say sells weighs heavily on the pursuit of the road we have been appointed or called to travel.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost
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