Why Create?
an ostrich egg and polymer clay by t norman
I could start with Why Blog About ART? Lots of artists blog as another way to promote their art, or to boost sales. That means they blog to get their name out and to increase their artist income. Is that why I am starting this blog?
In the days and weeks to come I will be writing about my motives to create to see if I can answer these questions about myself. I write to find out what I think.
I continue to wonder about this creative inclination that exists within myself and, of course, it existed in millions of other people. It is possible that this creative inclination exists within every human being who has ever lived or will ever live.
My interest in creativity, and my creative efforts come with a ton of doubts and a boat load of misgivings. I am not a great writer and I am not a great artist. At times all my creative efforts feel like poor imitations of the works by other more skilled creative folk. So why would I bother to blog about art or creativity? It’s dumb. It’s foolish.
Yes. . . we are foolish, but we cannot be
any other way so we may as well relax and live with it.
How To Live by S. Bakewell
If you accept the concept that it is silly for me to do what has already been done, then I suppose it is silly to do anything. I’ve gone so far as to wonder why I would paint when I know enough about painting to know that I’m not all that good at it. I may be a better painter than someone who has never seriously tried to be an artist, but among people who try to be artists, I am not that good an I know it.
If you love me, or have positive friend-like feels towards me you might be tempted to argue with me, but you will not succeed in changing my mind about this. I look through Pinterest pins that prove to me that I am just not that good. I follow thousands of artists on Instagram as well. So why do I create? Why bother?
One unperfectness shows me
another, to make me frankly despair myself.
Othello
Act 2 Sc. 3
by William Shakespeare
The thing is, I create stuff because I want to create stuff. I want to paint and draw and sculpt, and write and build. In the past I also liked to sing, and play instruments, and to act. It seems to me that creativity is a human trait. Creativity is a human urge, it is a need that lives within everyone, maybe, and it surely lives with in a lot of people, perhaps most people. Perhaps this creative urge is ignored, stuffed down, folded under and ignored by many, but I sense that it is there. You see it in a person who has never painted anything, but they pause before a painting and admire what was done, and feel a wish within that they could do something like that.
"Do not hate and fear the artist in yourselves,
my fellow citizens. Honour him and love him. Love him truly— do not try to
possess him. Trust him as nobly as you trust tomorrow. Only the artist in yourselves is more
truthful than the night."
by E E Cummings quoted in
Essay in the anthology The War Poets (1945) edited by Oscar Williams
I am not smart enough and not skilled enough to explain other people to themselves. I now believe that it is nearly impossible for me to understand anyone else, that the only person I can hope to explore is myself. I will be the focus of my study. I do this, not because I am so significant, but because I have a mind and all I feel I can truly know is what I discover as I study myself. I wish I knew why humanity creates stuff, but all I will attempt to know is why I create stuff.
Part of my curiosity about this stuff is that I want to have a reason to create more. Or I want a reason to give up and stop wasting my time and money doing something that does not matter.
The lesson of my childhood
was that if you anticipate misfortune, you make it hurt less. It’s a fool’s truth, but what truth isn’t?
Dragonfish
by Vu Tran
I was raised and trained to expect bad stuff to happen. I was taught to self-deprecate, to be meek, to not think more of myself than I ought, to not get too big for my britches.
The
angleworms, turned up by the plow, looked
uneasy,
like shy people trying to avoid praise.
"Waking on the Farm" by Robert Bly, from Eating the Honey of Words. Harper Flamingo, 1999
I actually could not produce many works of art when I was trying to be great at it. Once I accepted that I was not great, and once I gave myself permission to produce bad paintings, I started producing a lot of paintings. It occurred to me that every painting done by a great artist was not great. Great, good, and poor are subjective, of course, but in my own work I have paintings that I think are better than others.
For example, the following two paintings are not, in my opinion, all that good.
However, I sort of think these two paintings are better:
The first is a self-portrait back when I was trying not to smoke. The other is intended to just be pretty. There might be a hidden meaning in the work, but it is hidden from me as well as hidden from everybody else. I called it Thorny Thoughts and I have painted this picture three times so far. People who wanted the painting had a larger space and the painting was too small so I painted it larger. Oh, well.
The second is an iconography representation of me and my with, using collage.
I actually believe that, for me, being an artist is a long process of learning my craft. Maybe someone more gifted gets it fast and paints perfectly the rest of their life, but that is not me.
“Creation is the artist's true function. But it would be a mistake to ascribe creative power to an inborn talent. Creation begins with vision. The artist has to look at everything as though seeing it for the first time." -- Henri Matisse, French Fauvist
"Everyone has talent at 25. The difficulty is to have
it at 50.” -Edgar Degas
If you hear a
voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that
voice will be silenced. -Vincent Van Gogh
