By
Justin Trapp
Arizona Daily Wildcat
There's a lot of brown. Not that it's so important, but it's one of the things I've noticed since moving to Arizona.
Being a Michigan kid until about three weeks ago, I find myself missing the water and dense green of the north at least once a day. Not that it's so important, but I've missed it.
What is important is the effect this kind of climate has on art. The architecture speaks with a few more curves - a Spanish influence. The fashion styles are lighter, with more colors. The regional paintings are a bit more relaxed in their message and constructed with amazing new palettes. I suppose this isn't obvious to everyone, but I see it, if for no other reason than because it's so new to me.
Art, as a functional thing, provides people with a reference point on which they base their own sense of beauty. Some rebel, some conform and some simply modify, but art is always the key. Geography plays a major role in how art takes on a physical form.
I write quite a bit; it's a release for me. When I was in Michigan, much of my poetry had a water motif. I didn't know it then so much, but I see it now. The ideas of blue, cold, wet and drowning all fell somewhere into my work. I fleshed out those poems with the nuances of human relationships, the falling of leaves and the strange paradox of my land. My home.
I haven't even taken a creative writing class at the UA yet, but my style is changing. There's dust, strange new thoughts based on climate, and the notion that mountains at sunset are no particular color at all- that they simply exist. Art changes with respect to its surroundings, not to be accepted, but to be relevant.
The changing art is also dependent on its medium. By this I mean the artist, not the art form. Artists can not master their art. They can master the formulas and techniques of form, but art is still cultivated by the creative mind. It exists regardless of potential or skill, separate from the artist. The artist's job is to nurture what already exists and to give their preference to art.
Here, I've noticed that many people on campus don't smile at passers-by or even look at each other. This must say something about art. I used to invite people I didn't know out for tea, or for a long walk around a lake. I'd read children's books and bob my head to jazz with, for all practical purposes, complete strangers. Is it the responsibility of art to bring people together, or is it the job of the audience to respond to that art by becoming more personally involved with it?
I'm not sure. I just moved here; I'm not sure about much at all. And after the poems, the vacant stares of the passers-by, and the heat of another day in the high Sonoran, I go home to think about new things and remember the old.
I simply miss the water, and the green that came with it. Not that it's so important. I just thought you should know.
