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Three Weeks for Dreamwidth: Art
Apr. 30th, 2015 06:40 amThe third April Moon prompt is a black and white piece of art, incorporating spiral designs and various patterns in each of the arms of the inward spiral.
I have a relationship with art and creativity that is probably not the healthiest. Because creative talent has always been defined to me as the ability to make things from scratch, without having or needing a recipe or formula to produce them. And heavily weights toward visual art, although music and writing are in the scope of that idea. Creative people come up with ideas and then have the ability to put those ideas on their chosen medium. They don't copy or face or take something else and build on it.
It's kind of like the relationship Sheldon and Leonard of the Big Bang Theory have with each other, namely that Sheldon forever considers Leonard an inferior physicist, because Leonard, the experimental physicist, is only taking other people's ideas and seeing if they work, instead of coming up with the ideas and theories themselves. (They both look down on Howard, the engineer that actually builds and repairs stuff, for not having a doctorate and for not working with a "pure" science. It's very Platonic, actually, both this idea of creativity and the heirarchy of the geeky professions.) Creativity was defined in a narrow band of possibilities within a limited range of disciplines. And since, at the formative stage, I didn't have the ability to create things from whole cloth in those disciplines, I haven't really ever felt like a creative person.
With age comes wisdom, though, and an expanded appreciation of what creativity entails. Remix culture, for example, expands the available creative space to people who can put together already existing things in novel ways. Fanworks and transformative works say that creativity exists in those who can take the raw blocks of a setting and characters and produce new things. (With a proper public domain, that creative work could be sold or otherwise profited upon to make a living openly.) Music performance involves making runtime decisions about what the symbols on the page actually mean in terms of the intended sound - does your "medium volume" actually mean "medium volume underneath the melodic line" or "medium volume as the melodic line, so don't step on your accompaniment" or just "medium volume, because my scored dynamics make sure everything comes out correctly"? There is a gap between playing what's on the page and making music that has to be filled by the creative capacities of each player. Writers need editors, cover artists, and other creative talents to take a manuscript and make a book, and so forth.
Perhaps because I'm still a bit blocked on my own "out of nothing" abilities, or because, as Ira Glass notes, my talent Gant caught up to my taste, I find I've got the knack for taking other people's work and helping them refine it, or snagging something and adapting it to my needs. I might not be able to create the script or program from the beginning, but if someone's already done it, or there's an idea present, I can often get to completion. So while I don't draw, I have picked up the skill of digital line drawing and put it to use digitizing the works that appear on my drawing pad at work. I took a shell script that pointed at one file and then made copies to point at other files so that RetroPie could play all of the games needed instead of just one.
And I've been helping flesh out ideas for the summer program by taking the skeletons of other ideas and transforming them into fuller, more complete versions. It's the mid-work that's the province of Hufflepuff - it's got to get done, and it gets done by people who are just putting their heads down and working.
Which is why it was such a delight to see an email in my inbox giving praise for the work done on a particular idea. And praise in the form that mentioned how creative it was. That kind of encouragement is pretty rare. At least in the States, where we value the innovator, the discoverer, the "creative force" that does it first, being the person that comes next, or the one that takes the idea and makes something practical and useful out of it sometimes means a lifetime membership in House No Credit.
Doing all of this, though, and boosted some by the compliment given, I think I'm starting to come to the conclusion that there is creativity in tinkering, in changing, in deconstructing and analyzing, and in transformation. Such that yes, even in the work of the library, we can all say that we are creative beings, even if none of us have ever made a thing from scratch.
I think it would do wonders for our perception of self.
I have a relationship with art and creativity that is probably not the healthiest. Because creative talent has always been defined to me as the ability to make things from scratch, without having or needing a recipe or formula to produce them. And heavily weights toward visual art, although music and writing are in the scope of that idea. Creative people come up with ideas and then have the ability to put those ideas on their chosen medium. They don't copy or face or take something else and build on it.
It's kind of like the relationship Sheldon and Leonard of the Big Bang Theory have with each other, namely that Sheldon forever considers Leonard an inferior physicist, because Leonard, the experimental physicist, is only taking other people's ideas and seeing if they work, instead of coming up with the ideas and theories themselves. (They both look down on Howard, the engineer that actually builds and repairs stuff, for not having a doctorate and for not working with a "pure" science. It's very Platonic, actually, both this idea of creativity and the heirarchy of the geeky professions.) Creativity was defined in a narrow band of possibilities within a limited range of disciplines. And since, at the formative stage, I didn't have the ability to create things from whole cloth in those disciplines, I haven't really ever felt like a creative person.
With age comes wisdom, though, and an expanded appreciation of what creativity entails. Remix culture, for example, expands the available creative space to people who can put together already existing things in novel ways. Fanworks and transformative works say that creativity exists in those who can take the raw blocks of a setting and characters and produce new things. (With a proper public domain, that creative work could be sold or otherwise profited upon to make a living openly.) Music performance involves making runtime decisions about what the symbols on the page actually mean in terms of the intended sound - does your "medium volume" actually mean "medium volume underneath the melodic line" or "medium volume as the melodic line, so don't step on your accompaniment" or just "medium volume, because my scored dynamics make sure everything comes out correctly"? There is a gap between playing what's on the page and making music that has to be filled by the creative capacities of each player. Writers need editors, cover artists, and other creative talents to take a manuscript and make a book, and so forth.
Perhaps because I'm still a bit blocked on my own "out of nothing" abilities, or because, as Ira Glass notes, my talent Gant caught up to my taste, I find I've got the knack for taking other people's work and helping them refine it, or snagging something and adapting it to my needs. I might not be able to create the script or program from the beginning, but if someone's already done it, or there's an idea present, I can often get to completion. So while I don't draw, I have picked up the skill of digital line drawing and put it to use digitizing the works that appear on my drawing pad at work. I took a shell script that pointed at one file and then made copies to point at other files so that RetroPie could play all of the games needed instead of just one.
And I've been helping flesh out ideas for the summer program by taking the skeletons of other ideas and transforming them into fuller, more complete versions. It's the mid-work that's the province of Hufflepuff - it's got to get done, and it gets done by people who are just putting their heads down and working.
Which is why it was such a delight to see an email in my inbox giving praise for the work done on a particular idea. And praise in the form that mentioned how creative it was. That kind of encouragement is pretty rare. At least in the States, where we value the innovator, the discoverer, the "creative force" that does it first, being the person that comes next, or the one that takes the idea and makes something practical and useful out of it sometimes means a lifetime membership in House No Credit.
Doing all of this, though, and boosted some by the compliment given, I think I'm starting to come to the conclusion that there is creativity in tinkering, in changing, in deconstructing and analyzing, and in transformation. Such that yes, even in the work of the library, we can all say that we are creative beings, even if none of us have ever made a thing from scratch.
I think it would do wonders for our perception of self.
