|
|
|
|
|
Creativity
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Visual Creativity
I understand why some people don’t “get” abstract expressionism. I think it is a manifestation of imagination in it’s most pure basic form. As the artist mines his/hers artistic brain, paintings emerge as the visual result of pure thought. It’s no wonder that understanding abstract art can be daunting. Even the title may not give a clue to what the artist intended. It is the genre that is most frequently criticized, largely because it can be interpreted more subjectively than all the others.
Creativity is a strange thing. For me, it’s a wave of energy, driving me to generate something from within. It’s my own thought – it is essentially me. I own it. Every piece of art is like hanging a page of a diary in public, inviting everyone to read my concealed secrets. I can express any and all emotions in the canvas.
Creativity comes to me from different directions. One path appears because I want to change something. When I look at nature, architecture, my art as well as others, I sometimes feel a need to change it – balance the composition, enhance the colors or tweak the lines to make things more congruent. I focus on the piece and look for ways to fix it, if maybe just in my minds eye.
For example, I see the side of a paint bucket that has been used for many different colors. The smears and runs of one color overlap another, exposing yet another color. I could take that bucket and add a line or two to define areas of balance as I strive to create the perfect composition. The result is a new, completed piece of art, albeit small and from unassuming beginnings.
The goal of changing something is not for the sake of change as much as it is an underlying drive toward correctness. It just may look better changed slightly and that may, in turn, trigger a new composition or a whole new visual direction.
A movie director holds up both hands to frame the perfect shot any way he chooses. It becomes his/hers perfect composition, one that is correct in his eyes. In this similar determination is made by the painter. The scene becomes a part of a whole movie. The same occurrence can happen within the composition, each piece playing small part of the whole.
Each small piece of the composition such as sparkle is just as important as dull, brightness is just as important as dark, soft is just as important as bold. The candy for the eye is just as important as a place to rest your eyes. The perfect composition requires all of these qualities in balance.
Or creativity might be like seeing a specific thing from all angles, all at once, overlapping and dissecting or superimposing images. These are real time images imagining them as translucence's. Although only in my minds eye, it is like juxtaposing real images that become ethereal images. It’s all generated from within – from nothing. Sometimes the process may spur a concept never seen before. And then creativity comes from nowhere – the blank canvas, that all white surface that starts with you, generated from within. For a writer, it could be the new piece of paper in the typewriter, the blank computer screen, the first page. And from here, it’s all ethereal, generated only from within, and yet, from nowhere.
But does creativity really come from nowhere, assuming that nowhere is the mind? We are all showered with visuals created within nature or by others. Could bird sounds have stimulated our early ancestors to compose song? What prompted that first artist to recreate animals on the cave walls in Lascaux?
It is said we all have creativity. And for some, it was never been developed. And I’m sure there are varying degrees of creativity that may just start with simple “likes or dislikes”. But true creativity is one thing that is very difficult to teach and the process of teaching is really harvesting what may already be there. You can teach technique, but you can’t teach true creativity.
But to sum it up, creativity in any form is as subjective as preferring pepperoni or sausage on your pizza – it’s just a matter of taste.
Ray Zovar
|
|
|
|
Fine Art by Ray Zovar
608-838-6617 Studio,
608-345-2991 Cell
|
|
