The Art Behind Every Journey

IS TRAVELING AN ART? 

As an avid globetrotter myself—as well as an artist—I have reveled in the idea of travel itself being an art form. But am I touting an unfavorable viewpoint?

At the outset, let’s clear something up: I’m referring not just to our wandering eyes setting on the arch of a doorway or the bright colors at a local food market in a faraway continent—that could very well be argued to be the spark that creates art, if not art itself. But here, I’m referring to the very act of travel itself.

And yes, even with that definition of travel as an odyssey, I sure feel like it is.

How?

Well, first off, losing my way in a city that looks like a maze and is filled with strangers where no one speaks my language has often had in me the same kind of creative juices flowing as when I stare at a blank canvas. In both, I’m trying to find my way, understand geometry, figure out the concept, and lay the foundations of a composition I’m about to create on it. In one, it’s with footsteps I tread and the mud that gathers on my shoes; in the other, it is with a charcoal I wield and the soot that blemishes my fingers.

Then there’s choreography. The pace, the pause, the detour, the U-turn, and ultimately, the return, are all motions that build up my momentum when I complete my creative masterpiece. It is like a 2D representation of the act of creating being transposed onto a 4D model of reality, where space and time are both real and changing. My walk in one of the world’s most crime-ridden cities, Port-au-Prince, for instance, brought to light my vulnerability, genuinely reminding me of an experience I had years back at an art gallery. Walking underneath Damien Hirst’s installation of a 14-foot tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde, tantalizingly called The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, I had similarly come face to face with death, mortality, and the sublime. Only then did it involve a different species of predator.

But when I speak of travel as an art form, I’m speaking mostly to its capacity to hold a mirror to my face. It’s a self-portrait, not unlike Picasso’s cubist version of his face that is at once variegated and disembodied. Yet, it is somehow as real as it gets. Seeing the painted faces of an Omo Valley tribesman or the proud owner of a Ferrari in Monaco both feel like they could well be my very own self-portrait—one that I’d have seen in the mirror.

Perhaps in another life.