Photo: Ron Adams of Willmar, MN, describes his paintings at a showing last April at the Bird Island MN Cultural Centre. Often with over-sized canvases in oil and acrylic, he paints photography-based reflections of the quiet moments in daily life.
On vacation at a northern Minnesota lake cabin long ago, one evening we took up an invitation from the resort owner to gather with other guests in the main lodge for hot chocolate and conversation. The owners, one a former English teacher, hoped to launch conversation by opening with a question, ‘what is art?’
While I’m not sure if it was the brandy in the hot chocolate, or a rare exception to my usual introverted reticence, I replied ‘all art is communication’. Then a somewhat know-it-all twenty something, I had recently read something to that effect in some lofty magazine. Like hot chocolate gone cold, that topic lost its appeal, and we moved on to something else, me feeling somewhat silly for saying what I did. And perhaps asking for another shot of brandy in my hot chocolate.
Now older and wiser, I still think of art as a major form of communication. Artists of all types reach out to an audience hoping to express ideas, beliefs, knowledge, facts, symbols that manifest in entertainment, knowledge, and inspiration. That is true for all forms of artistic expression: Painting, literature, drama, music, dance, film, and now Tik Tok and YouTube. For writers, I like this analogy to painting: In literature every word is a brushstroke. Each one is more or less important, and together they create the whole.
For my own understanding, I define art as: The communication of ideas and emotions using aesthetically pleasing symbols, expressing information based on intelligent knowledge and an understanding of the human condition. The latter part of that is attributed to Karen Armstrong, the British author and theologian.
But you don’t need to be an ‘artist’ to create. Creating gives meaning to life. And it is a very wide range, almost infinite. I offer examples ranging from baking cookies to painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Just cleaning the house is creative – it creates a clean house pleasant to live in. Creating, anything good, day in and day out. And creation under God in the universe is on-going, as I understand it in the process theology of British mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead.
While I like to think that this insight about creating arose from my own inspiration, I understand that the idea likely was planted long ago by someone else, a teacher, perhaps? It gained reinforcement from an excellent self-help book by David Emerald, The Power of TED – The Empowerment Dynamic: Page 118: “Human beings must create; it’s hard-wired. The reality is this, you cannot not create.” (Read the book and you will learn about the Dreaded Drama Triangle, and what to do about it.)
Creating is essential to discovery. Learning and finding wisdom are not simply products of searching and discovering. Active creating brings learning, wisdom, discovery. I wish that I had understood that in my twenties. I lacked the confidence to write because I knew that I really didn’t know enough.
Later in middle age, when I was peddling my first novel to agents, two of them who also suffered from a writing affliction, we expressed a similar experience. When younger we lacked confidence, and sufficient ambition to overcome it, to begin our writing earlier in life. Perhaps had I started writing earlier, the act of creating would have enhanced learning and discovery sufficient to offset having less life experience. If you are a younger writer, just do it, for your own sake if no one else pays attention. Someday maybe they will.
Some of this relates to a future blog about authors, who are they and what makes them tick? Here I am drawn to the words in Quarks, Chaos, and Christianity, by John Polkinghorne, the British physicist who made a career change to become an Anglican priest. “… We must pay attention to the artists, for the fact that the world is the carrier of beauty is surely deeply significant… art is a window into reality… We must also pay attention to the writers. At their most profound they portray for us a world that is the arena of moral choice and responsibility.”
Sounds daunting and like a lot of work, but we keep plugging along, painting, typing, or other art form, creating something that strives to be artistic, and that some people will notice.
Next up: Important books that shaped and reflected America. This is where it all started, the idea for Words on Paper – Fiction, philosophy, and the Great Conversation about the human condition. Perhaps it’s like reverse engineering from looking at current books and back to the basics.
Thanks!
Forrest
