“Art is a visual metaphor rich enough for what one might call reality”, says Mathew Collins. In other words, art is our way of creating our own realities. It is both our escape from and our celebration of ‘everydayness’.

Art was born out of the innate human urge for expression. Even prehistoric Picassos liked drawing on the walls. It’s just that they found almost everything (except animals) uninspiring, which is why they drew mainly bulls, horses, deer, bulls, the occasional human, and more horses the first few centuries.

So here’s the good news. We are all artists. The bad news is that we tend to keep forgetting the good news. But Wassily Kandinsky’s words give us some solace:

“There is no must in art because art is free.”

What this essentially means is that pretty much anything you create can be called art. It is this absence of rules—this limitlessness—that makes art so magical.

There are 3 things that art requires:

Imagination

In the world of art, anything is possible. It is the job of the artist to tap into this infinite possibility. Imagination is your time-space-world-travel machine, and here’s what you can do with it:

Expression

We have a tendency to gravitate towards the beautiful and the aesthetic, and to create such things ourselves. Through art, we can bring into the world a photograph of what is in our minds, and thereby a piece of ourselves.

Like this, for instance:

Interpretation

An artist sees not just what is, but what isn’t. Art celebrates our ability to look at the same thing and see something different. Consider a tree, for instance. The humble tree has had a long and eventful journey through time. And here are its reinventions:

As Thoreau puts it, what matters here is not what you look at, but what you see. It’s time to see things a little differently.

Welcome to the world of art.