These two cultural artefacts – the shimmering silk cape and the Harvest Thanksgiving invitation – superficially very different, are both works of great dedication, made out of wonder and love to show the beauty of the world. The cape is woven from the silk of over a million Madagascan Golden Orb spiders (none of whom was hurt in the making). This glorious gold is its natural colour. The silk extraction and weaving, reviving an old Madagascan tradition, took over eight years to complete.
The Harvest Thanksgiving invitation was popped through my letterbox about fifteen years ago by the late Mrs Illingsworth, whose husband was minister at Bethesda. She must have written out hundreds of these, carefully ruling the lines and printing her letters clearly and unhurriedly, cutting, folding and then delivering them to every house in Hay. In both cases, there is an understanding that this celebration of beauty – of the silk, of the human skill, of the harvest – was something worth doing. Neither, plainly, is commercial.
I saw a couple of TV documentaries recently. In one, the presenter marvelled almost in disbelief at the hundreds of hours it must have taken to carve the Lion-Man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel with the primitive tools available 40,000 years ago. In another, a naturalist on a Caribbean island watched a turtle struggle up a sandy beach to lay her eggs. He deplored her slow, precarious effort compared with the sleek efficiency of the ichthyosaurus (his main subject) which gave birth to live young out at sea. But ichthyosaurs (if we allow the species for a moment) died out 100 million years ago while the turtles are still plodding on.
Why would they hurry? They live in the eternal present, never in a fancied future. They are not trying to get finished so they can move on to something else. There is nothing else for them to do. They are dedicated completely to their turtle thing. It is their being. In toto. This is what the Lion-Man carver, the silk-weavers and Mrs Illingsworth were up to. Why would they hurry – bodge the carving, photocopy the invites, buy a cape online? How better could they spend their time? Their work is dedicated, worshipful, whole; full of praise, creativity and love; not a project but a process; not a job to be rushed before a ‘well-earned holiday’, but life.
I am suggesting that our natural, logical and, unless corrupted, inevitable response to STA reality is awareness, love and imagination, and that these are embodied in us physically and uniquely expressed by our haecceities as praise, loving-kindness and creativity. Young children drawing or inventing things while playing clearly show that praise and love naturally inspire creativity. They want to join in, to co-create, to have ‘contact with a piece of reality’, as Simone Weil put it, forging a relationship between themselves and whatever they encounter, whether that be a mental or a physical experience. In this way they explore themselves and the world simultaneously.
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This picture was made by a three year-old boy called Rab. The notes were made immediately by his mother, asking him what the picture showed. The explanations may exactly reflect his meaning or, still possessed by his inspiration, he may have invented some of them. Either way, they show the wealth and complexity of the world inside his head, and his enjoyment expressing them. In his picture he shows no real interest in communicating his vision to anyone else. The complexity of the thoughts is not mirrored by complexity of expression – it has not occurred to him to balance form and content. He is happy for the merest fleck to represent the diver’s mask (so faint, in fact, that it is invisible in this copy). He is uninterested in scale – perhaps because he is uninterested in the overall picture, absorbed only with the bit he’s doing at any given moment. This is about him and the world, in this case a shark, a shark-keeper, a goldfish bowl and a rocket, a world he first encountered in books, on screens or in the playground, and has subsequently revisited in his own mind. He’s having fun and has barely intellectualized anything. He has made a heap of all he has found. Certainly he has not attempted to replicate external reality. Why would he want to do that, when the internal reality is so much fun? What would be the point in slavishly copying something that already exists? It is the responding, the reacting that is most important – creativity rather than reproduction. In its utter lack of discrimination, flinging wildly disparate elements together, it shows his innate unifying imagination. He is too young to discriminate. I am not claiming that this is the highest peak of human creativity. It will communicate little to anyone else or even to him if he revisits it a day or two later. It shows little skill, intellect, reason or subtlety of feeling because he hasn’t yet matured these qualities. He is three. It is the doing – the process rather than the project – that matters, and in that he perfectly mirrors nature’s own behaviour. Experience and schooling will replace, or perhaps merely overlay, the naivety, gusto and playfulness of this completely natural creativity with grown-up concepts of judgment and technique. And that will entail a loss as well as a gain.
In a magnificent peroration at the end of The Shock of the New (1980), Robert Hughes emphasizes the crucial link between Art and a child’s first imaginings. It’s worth quoting in full:
“I don’t think there’s ever been such a rush to insignificance in the name of the historical future as we’ve seen in the last fifteen years. The famous radicalism of 60s and 70s art turns out to have been a kind of dumb show, a charade of toughness, a way of avoiding feeling. And I don’t think we are ever again obliged to look at a plywood box or a row of bricks on the floor or a videotape of some twit from the University of Central Paranoia sticking pins in himself and think, ‘This is the real thing. This is the necessary art of our time. This deserves respect.’ Because it isn’t and it doesn’t and nobody cares.
“The fact is that anyone except a child can make such things because children have the kind of direct, sensuous and complex relationship with the world around them that modernism in its declining years was trying to deny. That relationship is the lost paradise that art wants to give back to us, not as children but as adults. It’s also what the modern and the old have in common – Pollock with Turner, Matisse with Rubens, Braque with Poussin – and the basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness not through argument, but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way to pass from feeling to meaning. It’s not something that committees can do; it’s not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It’s done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world. This task is literally endless and so, although we don’t have an avant-garde any more, we’re always going to have art.”
[Footnote: Society is opposed to this child-like vision because it seems retrogressive. In our fixation on the illusions of ‘progress’ and linear forward movement, we do not see childhood as something serious or valid in itself (let alone anything so sentimental as a ‘paradise’) but as a necessary training-course for the very much more important business of Adulthood. Our education system is specifically designed to eradicate childhood and the child-like vision. Wonder, imagination, creativity (and, for that matter, Christianity) all depend on its restoration. ‘The true purpose of art is to remember the paradise we have forgotten,’ says the painter Cecil Collins. ‘Art is a process of putting all the good things back where they were,’ says the writer Sebastian Barry. I do not mean to romanticise childhood; children are often greedy, egotistical and oblivious to the consequences of their actions. But they are not alone in this. Perhaps we should concentrate on eradicating these traits rather than innocence and imagination.
A footnote to this footnote: the local school, Gwernyfed, is in the grounds of an old manor. Its ugly vinyl sign screwed on to the stone pillars at the gate declares the motto ‘Persevere’, a miserabilist warning to children that life is hard and can be conquered only by joyless neo-Smilesian graft. Underneath, anciently carved in stone and weathered almost to invisibility, is the inexplicable but wonderful motto of the original old house ‘Taurus gaudet in silvis’ – ‘the bull has fun in the woods’. What a school it would be that privileged nature and joy over exam results and league tables.]
When we paint a flower, we are not painting that flower because that flower is unknowable. We are, instead, painting our experience of our communication with that flower (which includes its context, light and all the associations in our mind that the flower evokes). The flower is one thing, the experience is another, the resulting representation of that experience yet another. Things ramify into new forms in art as in nature. The attempt involves awareness, the haecceity of the experience, of the flower and of you, and love in the connection with the flower (and, perhaps, the viewer). It binds the world together – makes the world whole, as Robert Hughes demands – by acknowledging and communicating experiences. Just as everyone’s experience of the flower will differ, so will their picture. Similarly, each performance of a Beethoven sonata will be subtly different: an individual interpretation from within a range of possibilities determined by the score. This is exactly the same process by which we emerge as unique individuals out of a range of possibilities determined by our parents’ genomes and the time and place in which we live. Nature and creativity are the same.
Chardin, A Vase of Flowers (Scottish National Gallery)
By making art we make ourselves too. We make the world whole and then close the gap between us and everything that is not us. There is a strand of Christian thought which suggests that God may have created the universe to explain himself to himself. Whether or not that is true, it is certainly the effect creativity has on us – ‘the soul … realising itself in the course of transforming everything that has constrained it,’ as Marilynne Robinson describes the process. Novelty in art (which is more often unwarrantably graced with the name ‘originality’) is a chimera, as it is in nature. Or at least, because everything is new and unique, nothing is ‘New’. Just as every created being is individual, so every work of creativity is individual. But just as no creature springs out of nothing, but is a unique combination of existing ingredients, so no work of art is truly novel. We are influenced by the experiences we have had (including the art we have seen, heard, read) and respond by drawing out things that were already latent in us. Giotto, Picasso, Caedmon, Joyce – none of them sprang out of nowhere. And the same is true of appreciation in art. Our imagination is dependent on our experiences. Stubbs and Marc equally rely on the viewer’s prior experience of a horse, just as Ben Nicholson and Mondrian rely on the viewer’s experience of whiteness and rectangularity. [Footnote: there need be no dispute between the figurative and the abstract in art, because all art is necessarily abstract – it is symbolic of the thing represented. The visual fidelity of the representation is merely a matter of changing taste and fashion. Rothko’s black and Fra Angelico’s Gabriel are equally fancied immaterialities.] There can be no novelty. If an artist were to paint (or a musician to compose) something truly novel, we could not comprehend it, because it is only by association that we make sense of any sound, word or image (which, of course, is why it would be impossible to create in the first place). As Gaudi said, ‘True originality lies in returning to the origin’. Creativity twins the universe latent inside you with the universe outside you – and so you discover and thereby make yourself. As Robert Frost affirms: ‘I write to find out what I didn’t know I knew.’
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