There is a belief that artists are terrible people. A man I once met expressed this belief as he shrugged his shoulders in despair while telling me that his child is a "dreamer" who is interested in making paintings. How terrible it must be to suspect one's own child of being an artist!

Artists have dreams. They dream about a world that could be. They dream about things and about ideas that have never been, and they want them. They want them so much that they cannot rest until they have made those things real, those ideas true.

Once these artists have made their creations, they want to give them away. What gifts these artists have given us. We know what elves and giants look like. We have traveled twenty thousand leagues under the sea, lived with creatures from space long before Apollo. We know Spiderman, the Hulk, and the X-Men. We know what the devil looks like, and angels as well. We can go anywhere and be anyone in art!

These gifts of artists may be more real to us than memory. We spend more of our lives with an artist's creation than we really realize. Art is all around us.

Yes, artists are awful, selfish people. They build worlds of their own and make us live in them.

That is an awesome power!!