Thursday, February 15, 2007

Creativity is a Private Affair



Creativity is a private affair. It is the process of rummaging through and penetrating the intimate world of accumulated memories, thoughts, and sensations down to the very nature of being. If the process of creating does not begin at the source, it stands the danger of becoming a surface experience resulting in a superficial display.

Murray Louis

Speaking about the background of his creative work Aaron Copland wrote:

“What, after all do I put down when I put down notes? I put down a reflection of emotional states; feelings, perceptions, imagining, intuitions. An emotional state, as I use the term, is compounded of everything we are: our background, our environment, our convictions. Art particularizes and makes actual these fluent emotional states. Because it particularizes and makes it actual, it gives meaning to ‘la condition humaine’.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

A World of Images



Whenever we begin to work or to attend to something we have made or collected, a world of images opens up before us. As we move or make, write or speak, we bring in to existence the stories of that world. As we work we may feel we are at the edge of some story that we do not know, or moving in and out of different stories whose shapes we cannot quiet see. And as we continue to work and to respond to what we have made, these fragments may begin to cohere as clusters of images or loose narratives. These are not necessarily stories in words, nor are they generally the conventional type of story with a narrative line, a beginning and an end. But as we work we begin to get a sense of an emergent world with its own elements, its own way of coming together.

From A Widening Field. Journeys in Body and Imagination by Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay