2 posts tagged “heart”

"You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you have something to say." — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sunset

Fitzgerald’s worlds are apt for any artist. Whatever the artform or medium the true artist pursues her or his creation not for the purpose of simply bringing this one project to fruition, but because she or she is committed to the process of manifesting ideas into physical form accessible to others through sight, sound, touch, taste and even smell.  

The experience of applying structure to the what lives in one’s heart and mind requires not only commitment to attending to one’s bursts of inspiration, but also ascertaining the skills necessary to render comprehensible the dream-like concepts and hopes of one’s mind, and images that so enrapt one’s thoughts. The artist adept at her or his craft delivers them in a manner that stimulates the observer, taster, listener, reader.  
She or he brings into form a work that when the admire, in physically touching the artist’s creation, is moved in other, more aesthetic and less measurable, but no less potent ways. The admirer as did the artist come to know the artist, as did the artist her or himself, in completing this leg of the process.

So much of what we as artists create is a recreation of who we are, our identity that is forever changing and evolving.  Just as each story the author weaves is autobiographical, each song the musician either writes or reinterprets in her or his understanding of the music, and each painting the painter completes, is but one more rung on the ladder toward defining not only their purpose in having committed themselves to their chosen artistry but also in discovering and revealing their need to create. And with that they are given a wider glimpse and perspective of the one directive that so drives their inspiration.

Author and poet, David Mura, says that, “… when the writer discovers why she or he is writing,” realizes the larger story that is coming through them, “…that writer is then able to write all the smaller stories they imagine and are drawn to write.” [David Mura, author of Turning Japanese:  Memoirs of an Sansei, , Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, and Identity, After We Lost Our Way, Angels for the Burning, The Color of Desire: Poems.]

As artists we live in the macrocosm of our hopes, dreams and wishes held within the microcosm of our imagination. These creative desires manifest themselves and all their comprising aspects the various projects we perceive within and bring to completion in physical form. We experience these desires in their early stages of their appearance as inspiration.

Inspiration is our need, the urge within us, to tell these smaller stories, paintings, and piece of music that form a mosaic to the larger end of clarifying for ourselves and others to see why we create.  The compilations of our work, the body of our creative endeavors are in essence an ode, or rather numerous variations on a larger theme of who we are, and our need to bring life to what would otherwise remain a wish or thought hidden in our memory.

To create something just for the sake of completing that one creation is myopic and gives short shrift to the intricate and complex beings we are.  No one painting can express the essential nature of an artist, both as a human being and a person who has experienced and followed through on the compulsion to bring form to the chaos of yearnings of their heart and soul.

For those who say,"I had not the energy nor the desire to persist,” perhaps what lay embedded in their words is, “I lacked the strength to discover and experience who I really am.”
A human individual is never a means to an end, rather the end of long sought after revelations, the creations of which the artist’s hand unveil during each step of utilizing their craft and skills.

Last evening while helping my child with their homework I was called to read a re-interpretation of the Creation Story presented in Genesis.  The assignment focused on Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden—a result of both Adam and Eve having eaten fruit of the tree of knowledge.

Waterfall

The interesting thing about this book’s interpretation was that it saw the results of Adam and Eve’s act of eating of the tree of knowledge as bestowing them with not only an awareness of pain, death, and of shame, but a stark awareness of these factors that rendered them so naked and vulnerable as to destroy their ability to interact with divinity face-to-face. For some divinity is truth. For others it is a static or transforming deity governing one’s reality—Christ, Oya, Siva, Yahweh, Allah, The Buddha.

Many artists perceive God in and through the works we create. We interact with divinity when painting, writing, shaping poems or glass we blow into being with our breaths. Whatever the material, our work as artists is both an extension and expression of all that we cannot see, but know and sense present in this life.

The experience of creating is in essence a way, our attempt at touching upon, if not re-entering the Garden of Eden, if only for but a moment as when we give that last touch of color to an acrylic painting on canvas, write the final word of a novel or poem we have revised for the 5oth time, or simply stretch out a note on the piano or cello—take it into the unknown where sound meets with silence, and one absorbs the other.

Whatever our conduit for touching upon this blissful part of life and living that exists through, in and around us—the ultimate reality that bestows meaning upon our lives, we owe it to ourselves to let nothing stand in between our ability to return and sup from the brim of its overflowing cup.

We must remain committed not just to the act of creating that so brings us joy, but also to the truth that emanates through, and about the works of our artistry.  

We must acknowledge the breath of life moving in and out of us engendering the life force that directs our brush, guides our fingers in typing, our hands in writing, our voice in singing.  We must remain honest with ourselves, and follow the lead of our hearts. We must not fall in the search for certainty, and lose grip with its ever-present and evolving beat.

The heart knows what God desires, what we need, what we must create and how to accomplish it.  In our hearts dwells truth--that of the eternity of the ages. It lives in each moment we take a breath.