I’ve been heavily, heavily into Harry Potter the last few weeks. I’ve always liked the series, but since starting to re-read the books, I’ve become a true fan. I finished Goblet of Fire just before sitting down to write this. I’ve been thinking about creating a series called Heroes with portraits of both fictional characters and real-life personalities mixed together, exploring the blurring between fiction and reality that (especially) young people often seem to experience.
I still want to make happy art, but I also want to make sad art and angry art and frustrated art and political art and art with a message and art with no message, mysterious and beautiful.
I’ve been remembering how important daydreaming is for me. (Though I’m not sure if ‘daydreaming’ is the right word for it.) It really is essential for my wellbeing. I think it helps me be creative and come up with new ideas as well. Perhaps it’s a form of mental exercise which improves with practice like a positive feedback loop, and perhaps creativity is such a similar thing that they reinforce each other? Interesting theory.
On Friday, I went to buy art supplies because they had a travel watercolour kit half-price, which would be good to colour in the drawings I’ve been doing in my Hobonichi at lunchtimes at work. They had a Neon Night Garden in the courtyard next door and it was absolutely magical! While I was waiting for Husband to arrive, I took lots of photos and spammed my Instagram with them. Watching people, taking photos and making creative choices editing them all fed my excited, childlike creative side. I also got some canvases and a watercolour pad which I might use to do practice drawings for my Heroes series.
Today I went to fat yoga for the first time and it was awesome! I’d forgotten how good real yoga is, not the unchallenging stretching sessions that I couldn’t even be bothered to do at home. Getting to see Fox again was also awesome. I find her so inspiring, even her schlubby yoga outfits are inspiring! I think the instructor is an artist as well, so perhaps I can glom onto her once I get to know her a bit better. Gee that makes it sound like I’m definitely going again!
Now that my ipod is all set up with my new laptop, I can start listening to podcasts again! Except that I forgot that you have to transfer the podcasts to the ipod after you’ve downloaded them, so I wasn’t able to! I had an old episode of Wild Crazy Meaningful Life on there that I hadn’t listened to yet, though. It was a commentary on the book Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. The two ideas that stuck in my mind were:
Originally, i.e. in ancient Greece and Rome, genius and by extension creativity, weren’t seen as being inherent in a person. They came to a person from outside (hence the 9 Muses in the Greek pantheon). People weren’t perceived as being a genius, but having genius. That meant that anyone could have a genius idea, or be creative. Somehow over the centuries (I’m guessing during the Renaissance and the Romantic period), the concept changed to being an internal one. Only a select group of those born with genius could be creative. So often, when I tell people I’m an artist or they see me drawing etc, they say: “Wow, you’re creative, I’m not creative”. Well, in ancient Greece that would have made no sense at all.
1a. Following on from that, if genius/creativity was something that came from outside of you and ‘visited’ you, then it was natural at times for it to appear and disappear. Things like today’s concept of writer’s block would be seen as a natural part of life. Creativity ebbs and flows, and inspiration was respected as something that comes and goes, and can’t be forced.
2. They also talked about the idea of artists’ suffering. That to create good, ‘valid’ art, the artist must suffer, whether it be emotionally or financially. I think this idea also arose during the Renaissance and became solidified in the Romantic period. Today, it’s such a well-established trope that it’s implied in our conception of and discussion of art. I remember when I studied art history, we studied artists’ lives as much as their art, especially in the periods from the Renaissance through to the end of World War II. The more suffering the artist had been through, or the more peculiar their personality, the more focus there was on how those circumstances shaped their art. So interesting, I could write a whole essay on this. I could put it in my next zine.
Wow, I need to download more of this stuff!
