Creativity

It's generally believed that creativity is an attribute of a selected few. In fact, this is just not true. Though it may vary from person to person, creativity is, I believe, something that everyone shares.
The truth is that creativity is not nurtured or taught to each individual.

It's not that hard to teach creativity, but first you have to believe in it. And that works best if you believe in it as a gift more than a skill. Creativity wraps itself around curiosity and problem solving. It values the contributions of the individual voice.

But, of course, that is the reason it's not taught.  It asks questions, doesn't like to conform, challenges authority and asks the teacher to collaborate in all this. This can be quite unsettling.

The payoff for the student unfolds over a lifetime. The payoff for the teacher is the expanding of self that comes with each new student voice, in each new time and each new world.

Now and then

In earlier periods of the history of Western art, art was intended to endure. Today, once a piece enters a collection, it is almost immediately in need of conservation.

In the past, materials were chosen for their rarity, quality, value and permanence. Today, materials are chosen for their impermanence, rescue from deterioration, lack of value and commonness.

In the past, artists were craftsmen and guildsmen who were skilled and disciplined in their crafts. Today craft is "appropriate" and often peripheral to the work.

In the past, substance and meaning were in the work. Today, substance and meaning are often in the words that prop up the work.

In the past, the work was intended to speak to the common man and woman. Today, the work ignores and sometimes disdains the common man and woman.

In the past, art was necessary to enhance the nature of spectacle. Today, spectacle is necessary to enhance the nature of art.

Fully Human

This is a phrase that Jacob Bronowski used often in his writing on science and the arts. It always intrigued me because "human" as a species designation didn't probe or expand that word deeply enough for me. When we ask what the fullness of the human condition might be, it's hard to know whether this is a consequence of the brain, of our curiosity and striving, of our longing for transcendance, of our capacity for hope or out capacity for self-delusion.

Maybe this has always been a difficult problem to solve, but it is certainly that kind of problem in the contemporary world. Who helps lead us to an answer or even to the need to ask the question? I believe the schools have failed us, especially the university-factories. Religion has failed us, cowering in their "one-trueness" instead of living out their common core messages. Our leaders have failed us with little courage and imagination.

Have we failed ourselves as well? No one escapes the events of life that inevitably can discourage, poison, darken and even destroy us. But these are precisely the events that require the courage and faith that take us beyond ourselves. And that to me is where the fullness of being human lies. Truly, we are only "fully human" to the degree that all of us are.

Black Hole

Each of us is a black hole. If we stay comfortably outside of our own event horizons, we know the rules and negotiate the universe, even with its strangeness and eccentricities. But if we have the courage to approach that event horizon, we are pulled deep within ourselves, taken apart, reconfigured, and thrust into a new world as new selves with new mysteries to share.

Freedom

Freedom means the freedom to do or think what we want without limits or responsibilities. At least that's what many think and act on. But that to me is the emptiest and shallowest freedom. It a freedom that teaches us nothing and contributes nothing. It's a narcissistic freedom, a dead end. Freedom can only be understood in the contexts of the limits imposed on it, the limits it imposes on itself, the consequences it accepts when it acts with integrity. Mature freedom is not adolescent freedom. Freedom doesn't separate and glorify the individual; rather true freedom frees the self from the burden of self and allows unfettered connection to the larger community and the larger end.

Measuring a work of art

It makes me deeply envious.
It pulls me out of my skin--floating, dreaming, wandering.
It pushes me deeper inside myself.
I suddenly know something important and new.
I want to rush to my studio to try again.
I am connected.
I recognize I must have a voice, too.

Boundaries

Art, like life, is tamed, hemmed in, corralled, smothered by society’s conformist boundaries, even the most benign of them. For the serious artist, new boundaries must emerge from inner necessity. This means navigating a treacherous space, as boundless and without edge as possible, where risk, exhilaration, disciplined attention, love, failure, diligence, exhaustion all map new boundaries of the world swallowed and released, the boundaries that make possible the gift, the challenge, the prophecy that only you can give.