What's a Heart List?

 For as long as I've considered myself both an artist and a reader, I've had an intense fascination with fiction about art and artists. I'm hopelessly drawn to books with artists for main characters, regardless of genre or apparent quality. It's become a bit of an obsession.

 Recently, I've been rereading Kasie West's young adult novel "Love, Life, and the List", a book about a budding artist who, upon being rejected for an art show, becomes determined to bring more life and heart to her paintings. Our main character Abby embarks on an adventure to complete her "heart list", a bucket list of sorts inspired by the traits of the people she most admires in her life. It's a really fun book, a very sweet coming of age story framed through this process of artistic and self discovery.

 I'm coming back to this story 8 years after I first read it, and despite the fact that I'm no longer in its target audience, I've found myself connecting with it on a deeper level. For the pas year or so I've been in a period of creative crisis. I have not been connecting with art in the meaningful way that I'm used to. I don't feel the same drive, ambition, inspiration, or purpose. I used to be full of ideas, or at least the will and the means to generate them. Now, my art and my life has been feeling flat, no spark, no energy.

  I've started to recognize something in this admittedly silly young adult novel; I need to be pursuing Life in the name of Art. Experience, interaction, risk-taking, fear-facing, reflection. Doing the stuff AROUND the art that ends up informing it. I've decided it's time for me to write my own list, to find my own heart, to bring myself and my art back from the brink.

Part of the reason I'm making this blog in order to document myself trying that, mostly for my own future self as I really doubt anyone else will ever see this. (Hey future me! Did it work? Did the list make art exciting again?) Hopefully this will be entertaining at the very least!

With All My Heart, Jess