Blog: Natural vs Man Made

Décor is usually associated with rugs, textiles, lighting fixtures – and includes wall décor. It is the things used to decorate a room. The goal of décor is harmony. The value of décor is appeal through manipulation and control of color and shape. Décor governs how we see things. Décor subordinates objects to congruous patterns. Décor uses easily recognizable representational images.

Wall décor is rarely creative.

Décor is man-made and controlled. Décor is not art.

 Art happens naturally.

Unique, creative, original art is not controlled. Art is rarely representational when it begins. The process of making an art object begins with creating from the natural, connecting an intangible concept – an idea – with the visual world. In the end, the art object may be representational, but only when a concept is applied to the abstraction of the original idea.

Creating from an abstraction and bringing something into existence from nature’s chaos is what an artist does. An artist’s creativity stems from their ability to imagine. Artists have the ability to rearrange and change things they have observed in reality – the natural - into a representational object. And while the naturalness of something changes once the artist places their creative hand into the natural force – if what happens with the creative hand comes naturally, is not forced, then art and the end product remains a natural phenomenon.

Forcing something to become is not art, it is décor.

Art happens naturally.