Destination or Journey
Is it the destination or the journey? Is it the final image or the process of getting there? Is the very act of creativity a more deeply burning need than the finished product?
Some artists struggle mightily their whole life trying to please and be accepted, but they can’t stop being creative. A higher voice is calling.
Henri Rousseau, a lowly Parisian customs clerk, was laughed at by the Royal Academy, but where else will you see flowering ferns, monkeys with milk bottles and an America Indian wrestling with a gorilla? He didn’t care that he was a joke, he couldn’t stop dreaming and painting. He was “discovered” years after he died.
Many have found such joy in painting a landscape, carving a statue or composing a symphony that they were depressed when it was finished. It can be the same with writing a novel. I live with the characters night and day and don’t want to leave.
Albert Pinkham Ryder could never finish a work. Someone had to sneak into his studio and spirit the painting away. His paint is so thick it can slide down the canvas, but boy does it glow.
Me, I’m one of the strugglers. Sometimes I just can’t let go. Just back from Vietnam, I had to paint. It began aimlessly, but children I had seen “over there” began to emerge. Frozen in time, they look out at their village with hurt and fear—they were outcasts for some reason. Their struggle with hurt and fear became mine. The long journey became the destination.
You can get into a rut chasing quantitative stuff. "Goals." To most, art is simply decoration without deeper value or meaning. But if you’ve have been through serious physical or psychological traumas you can get de-rutted enough to see something of higher value. You can hear a spiritual force calling. Traumas get condemned as destructive and they are if people simply turn their minds inward—become self-obsessed. But if you can see beyond the stuff of the everyday hustle, and beyond shock, you can grab the gift of infinite human perception. You can sail beyond the ordinary…beyond the natural. The arts provide the means to see and feel the supernatural. They always have.