Created To Be Creative

Hey everyone,

To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t have any ideas for today’s blog post. In fact, I don’t even know what I’m gonna write. But I guess that’s the point of writing anyway – you just start somewhere and let the words flow. I’ve been having a mild case of the writer’s block of late, and I guess this is a way for me to break free from those shackles.

Anyway, writing helps me vent and I suppose it kinda completes me. I feel most creative when I write. Creative. Create-ive? Hmm… seems interesting…

I’m creative because I create? Yeah, I am aren’t I? But so are you!

I believe we’re all creators somehow. Artists more so than others, probably… But we’re all creators nonetheless. Scientists, teachers, engineers, tailors, painters, poets, writers – you name it – we all create. And I believe that by doing so, we fulfill an insatiable need to be creators.

You know, more often than not, what we create might most likely outlive us. Just take a look around you. Those famous monuments in your city, the poster of that famous painting that hangs over your mantelpiece, that poem that serves as your desktop wallpaper, the jewelry that’s now a prized family heirloom – they were all probably designed, built, painted, written, crafted, created by someone who lived decades if not centuries ago. You don’t know them, but their legacy lives on. A part of them is still alive through their creation.

And the thing about creation is that it inspires someone else to aspire to create something of equal or higher worth. Like 90% of the Renaissance was all about that. Like one dude paints or sculpts something totally awesome and then his student/admirer thinks he can top that and tries to make something better. Come to think of it, it was a curious case of ‘iron sharpens iron’. In any case, we definitely got some great art out of that time – paintings, sculptures, plays and poems – and all these and more remain timeless; they inspire us to this day.

[On a totally unrelated side-note, I think that this ‘inspiration’ devolved somewhere along the way, and we’re now stuck in a world where art galleries are filled with this abomination that is modern art.]

Anyway, I came across a sculpture today that absolutely blew my mind. It’s called the Veiled Virgin crafted by artist Giovanni Strazza from a single block of marble in the early 1850s. Although I bet it looks much more magnificent in person, this is what a picture of it looks like:

Just look at it and observe for like a minute. That entire sculpture was made from marble. How skilled do you have to be to make marble look transparent? And it’s not just the technical aspect of the art that makes it amazing. Through that veil, we not only see her face but we see the full extent of her emotion in it. So much perfection in one sculpture!

If we were to ask Mr. Giovanni what inspired him to create this awe-inspiring sculpture, he might probably say that he viewed art as something that needs to be freed from nature and that he merely ‘freed’ the sculpture from that block of stone. Every strike of the chisel and every soft touch of his palms brought the sculpture closer to freedom. Well, most artists of his time thought this way, and it was admirably modest. But if we were to press him further, he would tell us that he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his role-model, Mr. Whoever-Giovanni-thought-was-better-than-him. Well, he might even admit that he succeeded. In fact, he might even say that he’s better than his role model. However, one thing that he won’t admit is that his art was perfect.

We might see the Veiled Virgin as the epitome of perfection. Maybe art historians have studied it in detail. Perhaps art teachers and students around the world use it as a gold standard… But Giovanni would never admit – not in over 167 years (remember, early 1850s) – that his sculpture is perfect. Maybe that’s true. I mean for one, it’s only a head. He could’ve finished the rest of the body too.

But it’s not just Giovanni. Ask any artist and they will always tell you that their art, their creation, could be better. And it’s true. It’s always true.

We create something every day. And our creation is never perfect. But it’s always perfectly imperfect. And that means room for improvement! As the days roll by and we create more and more, we slowly become skilled creators. Giovanni’s work wasn’t the result of a day’s work. Not even a month or a year’s. It was the result of a lifetime’s worth of creation – his own skill was sculpted each day as he practiced and became better. Each day was a chisel strike on his personality as his true artisanship was slowly freed from within himself to be the creator of the Veiled Virgin.

And so it is with us. We create and we in turn are created. Creation then is not a one-time event but a continuous process that perfects the creator. But there’s a different word for that – Rediscovery.

So let’s create something today. Let’s get to our drawing boards, our workplaces, our bedrooms, our backyards, anywhere really – and let’s create! Let’s get started on creating paintings, poems, babies, spreadsheets, clothes, music, gardens. Let’s create new experiences and cross some things off our bucket-list. Let’s create love and steal a bit of time. Let’s just start somewhere (anywhere!) and let the words flow – the art will follow. And at the end of it all, we would’ve created something.

It could be something small, something big, something significant, something mundane. But let’s create! And in that, let’s rediscover ourselves.

Peace!