Thoughts on Creativity: Finding
Your Visual Voice
Wendell H. Arneson
Creativity grows out of the desire for change. The word change has
to do with unpredictability (how much or how little is up to you
– but do not repeat old solutions!
Creativity involves a leap of faith and confidence – faith in the creative process: ultimately art is a journey not directed by product but by the passage of thought, vision, intensive observation, time, and commitment.
The desire for change, faith in process, and the discipline to work is the critical components in becoming a more inventive artist.
Perhaps the greatest single barrier to becoming more inventive/creative is the fear of risk. Creativity demands that we step into the unknown.
“The artist should fear to become the slave of detail. He should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it. . . The artist has only to remain true to his dream and . . .must see naught but the vision beyond. . . Have you ever seen an inchworm crawl up a leaf or twig, and there clinging to the very end, revolves in the air, feeling for something to reach? That’s like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing.”
Albert Pinkham Ryder
Art, your personal work, is about vision, growth, and change.
Stay awake, stay alert.
Continually look, observe, and re-evaluate. Never stop questioning
or looking to see if you are using “old” or repeatable
solutions.
Do not begin a work by visualizing the solution before you begin. “If you know what a work is going to look like before you begin, why start???”
Steve Sorman
“When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m
doing. It is only after a sort of “get acquainted” period
that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making
changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life
of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose
contact with the painting that the result is a mess.”
Jackson Pollock
Start Simple (with the mundane) and create
the dialogue with the work (through process and intensive observation).
“The subject is the bait, but the bait withers away and the reality of the subject-matter is left and the bait – the subject matter – disappears. The reality is the residue of the subject-matter . . . this residue . . . perhaps has something tenuously to do with what one started with but very often had very little to do with it.”
Francis Bacon
“Art should be born from the material.
Spirituality should be born from the language of the material. Each
material has its own language and is a language.”
Jean Dubuffet
Take risks and more risks!!
∑Understand and push the elements of art (line, value, texture,
shape, color, and space). Consider and be inventive within each
element – to the role it plays in your work and its impact
on its content.
"When looking at your work, keep asking the simple but profound questions: “What is too even? What is too equal”?
Nathan Oliveria
Seek clarity of your idea while honoring mystery and ambiguity.
“Painting in this sense tends towards a complete interlocking of image and paint, so that the image is the paint and vice versa. Here the brush-stroke creates the form and does not merely fill it in. Consequently, every movement of the brush on the canvas alters the shape and implications of the image. That is why real painting is a mysterious and continuous struggle with chance – mysterious because the very substance of the paint, when used in this way, can make such a direct assault upon the nervous system; continuous because the medium is so fluid and subtle that every change that is made loses what is already there in the hope of making a fresh gain.”
Francis Bacon
” . . painting is much more immediate language, and much more direct, than the language of words: much closer to the cry, or to the dance.”
Jean Dubuffet
Clarify your ideas by continually looking and asking about the “nature of predictability”.
Invest in your passion. Where do you find your greatest excitement? . . . land, figure, interior, non-objective, scale, color, contrast, black & white, subtlety, intensity, etc., and any/all combinations.
If you are confident or consistent in what you do, get to a place where you don’t feel so comfortable. Do not use repeatable solutions!!
Promote (celebrate) the things (ideas) that are more eccentric, things which are more you! . . . any combination or single thing that makes your work different from others. Every subject has been done by someone, but not by you – through your eyes, experience, and vision.
Honor mystery and ambiguity.
“Painting isn’t just the visual thing that reaches your retina – it’s what is behind it and in it. I’m not interested in “abstracting” or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in it – drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or an idea. It doesn’t matter if it’s different from mine as long as it comes from the painting which has its own integrity and intensity.”
Willem de Kooning
Learn to trust, recognize, follow, and push your personal instincts and signs.
"The act of creation is a kind of ritual. The origins of art and human existence lie hidden in this mystery of creation. Human creativity reaffirms and mystifies the power of “life”. “Life” is the subject and the object of everything I make. When the act of creation is really successful, the “thing” creates itself. The artist is only a vehicle, a tool. Once created, the “thing” has a life of its own. I want to live and make things that live.”
Keith Haring
The artist Philip Guston (1913-1980), who bravely returned to imagery late in his career as a painter of abstractions, perhaps best revealed the entanglement between artist and image as manifested in paint: “You are faced with what seems like an impossibility – fixing an image which you can tolerate. What can be Where? Erasures and destructions, criticism and judgments of one’s acts, even as they force change in oneself, are still preparations merely reflecting the mind’s will and movement. There is a burden here, and it is the weight of the familiar. Yet this is the material of a working (process), which from time to time needs to see itself, even thought it is reluctant to appear . . .Where do you put a form? It will move all around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end, it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not been paid for, or a form that has not been lived through.”
That is the reason that accident always has to
enter into the creative process, because the moment you know what
to do, you’re making just another form of illustration.
Francis Bacon
