Creativity

Image by Dame Laura Knight

“This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can… reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah.”

~ Leonard Cohen

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love”

~ Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ (1880)

To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.

— Claude Monet

The practice of making art is a way to perceive reality without labeling what we see. Somehow we need to feel the full impact of contact with the world. The habit of naming everything walls us off from life. This practice is axiomatic to painting, but I believe it’s is also fundamental to the other arts.

The childlike mind that receives the full force of the essence of every experience, of every sight, loses its powers of receptivity as it gains language that can rationalize, explain and dismiss what hurts or lacks context. Learning to actually see what strikes your retina is basic training for a visual artist. It’s a meditative vision that must be developed. It dispels boredom and reveals the surrounding miracle.