What is Arts, really?
This journey in the world of Arts started this First Semester of the Academic Year, 2019-2020, when I enrolled in my ARTS 1 class here in the University of the Philippines-Los Baños.
With no personal background in the arts and with little artistic talent, I expected myself to be passive to no participation in the class. However as time progressed, I learned more about arts: its history and perspectives. How it evolves from one person to another. As our professor said, “If there are 33 students in this class, there are 33 different definitions of arts”.
As such, I’ve done many projects where I saw my artistic ability, as unrefined as it may be, flourish. Some of these involve painting a feeling with no defined form or shape, the usage of words and language in depicting an image or scenario, called ekphrasis, the tableau where our painted masks reflecting a certain virtue of ours were used, and the infamous creative presentation on what theatre is. All of these challenged my artistic side of my brain to resurrect and manifest in my artworks, both individually or with my groupmates. Now after a semester in studying Arts, you may ask me, what is arts for you? My answer is this: it is the expression of every emotion and situation in the human experience. It is the depiction of ideologies and beliefs. And most importantly, it is a reflection of the creation of the universe in which the human mind is the center.
