The Creative Process
This is a discussion that I would like to have with a bunch of you who are out there. I am feeling my way through my own process of creating, what, well, everything that I have an influence on in my life.
Maybe every moment is a piece of art. Every moment intersects form and substance; movement; being. But it usually feels like movement of substance through form to me. Sometimes it feels like form coming down on substance like an encasing prison. Other times if feels like substance freeing up and going everywhere before it settles back down again wherever it will.
I am just playing with this now. Maybe it is best that I just continue to play with it as gleefully as I can without using my serious eyes to place all of the pieces where they “should” be.
What do you all think? Or feel? Or do?
tagged: art, creative process
February 7th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
I believe that moments and the succession of moments are not art in the same way that nature is not art. Things in the natural realm are just part of the environment we occupy right now in the succession of moments.
Art is something we sometimes do in that succession of moments. Art is one of the ways we reflect and interpret that natural realm. Art doesn’t exist without the artist.
This is consistent, I think, with your sense of the act of creating art involving you intimately. My own experience is that the most perfect act of creation involves the balance of one’s soul, intellect, emotions, and body in the accomplishment of a deliberate act.
Whether that feels confining or freeing is, I think, a reaction to the act. Part of art’s effect is, after all, to convey a point of reference in the field of relative existence. There will necessarily be reaction.
But the art itself stands apart from that - like a fact, not a feeling. It stands related to - yet apart from nature, time - it just is.
The beauty and ugliness of the world and of the natural realm is how the artist’s eyes see it and how we portray it. Without a sense of aesthetics, the world just is - it’s not beautiful or ugly. And so, when art is created, it becomes part of that until someone else sees it. How well it conveys the artist’s vision - to one’s self and another - is a measure of its success - or so I have come to believe.
It may be useful to contemplate these things, but writing a good song doesn’t require it. Writing a song requires striking that balance of soul, mind, emotion, body - whether you perceive it or not. Writing a good song requires being adept at it. I think that following the course of creation ultimately leads on to a deeper understanding of the process and to these choses philosophiques.
But enough for now, time forget the scales and just blow, n’est pas?
February 7th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Hey Billy, Good to read you.
February 9th, 2008 at 7:16 am
Often lately I find myself finding it difficult to be objective. All I have is my own experience which is colored by my own perceptions. All I have is this moment in front of my right now. Yet it is true, I do reflect and the next moment and the next is affected by that reflection. At least my perception of it. Sometimes I feel like I am freeing myself of those perceptions that get between me and the moment itself. But I can never actually do that, I suppose. Maybe I am just flowing more freely within that balance of soul, mind, emotion and body.
At the moment of creation, my art is me. Then it goes out into the world and I objectify it. In that process I can form it. I guess that is why I say that to me, each moment, that is, each of my right now moments before they are past and objectified, at least has the potential for art. Maybe each moment as it has passed and is objectified can then be art. We can put attention and love into each moment as we choose. How well whatever is produced as a result of that moment can thus convey vision successfully or not. But then, I guess it is what is produced, whether it be a glance, a breath, a step, whatever can then be art. Can a breath convey vision? I think there is that potential.
February 9th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
We create every moment, as not a moment goes by that is not influenced by thoughts or actions from the past. Every moment is truly subjective for every person. It is never the same for you or me. Since we create every moment, we are artists of the world we perceive. We are the creators and the expressions. We create ourselves. Our lives are masterpieces.
Very thought-provoking subject.