Art and Creation

As I work on the Diatoms, the mind wanders in various directions, and I began to think about art and creation. What is art? This is a partial definition drawn from the AOL Merriam- Webster Dictionary -

The conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects ... art implies a personal, unanalyzable creative power ...

All artists use a medium, various materials, to create their art - Christo, for example, uses metal and cloth; almost any sort of material can be used to create art. But beyond the materials used, what goes into art is the artist's emotions - the self made manifest. Each work of art is necessarily invested with first, the artist's inspiration, and then his or her emotions as the artwork takes shape and comes to life.

This is, of course, equally true in the writing of a work of fiction. All of creation, no matter of what type, comes from within. This may truly be what separates us from the animals (but then, people have given elephants and monkeys paintbrushes and paint and turned them loose on canvases, and they have created something. Is this to be considered art? Did it spring from the well of the animals' emotions? Who's to say?)

I guess what I'm trying to say, in my rambling fashion, is that God, through his/her own act of creation, has given us the ability to create. Our acts of creation are drawn from the experiences which we have undergone, so each artist's creations will necessarily differ from those produced by someone else, and it seems that, if the art is pure and not produced by a hack whose only motive is profit or aggrandizement, then each creation is valid and worthy of being considered art.

I have included my "Vertigo" series; I produced them when I realized that my prospective novel had been sucked into a black hole.

Alone, we are vulnerable; with others, there is nothing we cannot do.

Bad word of the day:   hostility