Q. What are the distinguishing characteristics of great art?
A. Originality and integrity. Period.

Whatever form it takes—a book, a song, a painting, a sculpture, a quilt—art is about individual expression. But by that I don't mean that you can create art by consciously expressing your feelings about some thing or your response to some event in your life. I mean that your art should express who you are, what makes you you, how you see the world. A piece of art should reflect everything the artist knows about herself, about her medium, about her world.

Paradoxically, the more an artist's work is recognizably his or her own, the more universal it becomes, the more able it is to connect to and communicate with another human being. Why? Because we are all unique, and great art makes us aware of our selves. It wakes us up, shakes us from our automatic, daily routines, and redirects our nervous system from its outward focus to our inner depths..

It seems to me that artistic integrity is the real battle facing any creative person. Nothing is more important, and nothing is more difficult to achieve. It is certainly easier and often more comfortable to follow established paths. But if you want to create art, you have to be absolutely true to who you are, follow your own path, your own bliss, no matter the consequences. Don't follow leaders, take chances, make your own mistakes, learn and grow. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

The poet and painter e.e. cummings summed it up best for me. Here is a bit of one of his "six nonlectures," delivered at Harvard in 1963. If you haven't read that wonderful little book, I recommend it highly.

"...as far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art is and was and forever will be strictly and distinctively a question of individuality. If poetry were anything-like dropping an atom bomb-which anyone did, anyone could become a poet just by doing the necessary anything; whatever that necessary anything might or might not entail. But (as it happens) poetry is being, not doing. If you wish to follow, even at a distance, the poet's calling (and here, as always, I speak from my own totally biased and entirely personal point of view), you've got to come out of the measurable doing universe into the immeasurable house of being. I am quite aware that, wherever our so-called civilization has slithered, there's every reward and no punishment for unbeing. But if poetry is your goal, you've got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about self-styled obligations and duties and responsibilities etcetera ad infinitum and remember one thing only: that it's you-nobody else-who determine your destiny and decide your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else. Toms can be Dicks and Dicks can be Harrys, but none of them can ever be you. There's the artist's responsibility; and the most awful responsibility on earth. If you can take it, take it -and be. If you can't, cheer up and go about other peoples business and do (or undo) till you drop."

Amen.