THE LIVING CREATIVE
Why Artists Must Experiment
What artists, and others, can gain from experimenting
The realm within is murky, to begin with. Art-making is as mysterious as it ever was. No one has ever answered that question “where do your ideas come from,” because none of us really knows. Or, to be fair, some of us do, and some of us are very cognizant and intentional about that. Those who work under flood lights, with every crevice and shadow of the process illuminated, have a different relationship with the muse, with the gods, with landscapes of the mind, than those whose work is guided differently; inspired, as it were, by a less-well-understood spirit.
This article, I warn you, is itself an experiment: a conscious act of wandering. Recognizing an act as an experiment releases it from a lot of seriousness, a lot of demands of perfection. The outcome of experimentation is knowledge, and failure is just as valuable as success, because one has expanded one’s awareness of one’s own abilities, one’s deeper ideas, the potential of a media, a process, a genre, an art-form. This article is part of my exploration into the deeper aspects of the art-making process, something I’ve been engaged in heavily for the last 2 years. You can also think of this article as a sort of “letter to the young artist,” or the artist at any age…
