Why Artists Create: The Sad, Wonderful Truth

The creative urge is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. Without it, we would all be grubbing in the dirt, driven only by our primal instincts of reproduction and self-preservation.

As creators, something inside of us rises above the daily struggles of everyday living, seeking to capture, express or communicate some essence of our human experience. By even attempting to design, write, paint, invent, sculpt, or take on any form of creation, we strive to re-connect with the eternal, ever-present engendering forces in the universe.

However, the irony of this creative urge is that we will never get there.

For the terrible secret that all artists and creators know is that the tools of their trade are forever insufficient in capturing the essence of our existence. The best they can hope from their craft is an image of the thing itself. We want to be Makers of something new, not fabricators and fashioners of what already exists.

Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, who was one of the two founders of semiotics, explained that we communicate and create meaning through the use of signs and symbols:

“Meaning is made up of a matched pair of signifier and signified; the signifier is an image (sign/symbol) that describes the thing itself.”

So, to identify, talk about or describe a Tree, you need the word, image or some other sign of symbol to create any meaning related to the “Tree.”

Artists and Creatives are the purveyors of the secondary, dependent upon some other primary source of “The Thing Itself.”

In his preface to “Leaves of Grass,” Walt Whitman describes the poet as the interpreter for their generation:

“He is a seer … he is individual … he is complete in himself … the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not. He is not one of the chorus … he does not stop for any regulation … he is the president of regulation. What the eyesight does to the rest he does to the rest. Who knows the curious mystery of the eyesight? The other senses corroborate themselves, but this is removed from any proof but its own and foreruns the identities of the spiritual world. A single glance of it mocks all the investigations of man and all the instruments and books of the earth and all reasoning. What is marvelous? what is unlikely? what is impossible or baseless or vague? after you have once just opened the space of a peach pit and given audience to far and near and to the sunset and had all things enter with electric swiftness softly and duly without confusion or jostling or jam.”

Whitman speaks to the role of the creative as the voice and vision of an age, providing insight, perspective and access to what often remains hidden in our everyday lives. Through their signs and symbols, the artist illustrates bits and pieces of the universe all around us, knowing full well that they will never be able to give us the whole picture.

J.R.R. Tolkien admits that as creators, we are fashioning “Secondary Worlds” based upon our own experiences with reality. We are not primary makers, but can still design worlds that allow us to explore and discovery our own imaginations, in an effort to learn from what we already know. He expresses the fantasies of the ‘Sub-creator” in On Fairy Stories:

“Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every sub-creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it. If he indeed achieves a quality that can fairly be described by the dictionary definition: “inner consistency of reality,” it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the work does not in some way partake of reality. The peculiar quality of the ”joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.”

And that is the beauty and sadness of it all — we are driven to create the thing itself, but must settle for its reproduction, hoping that some of its essence will still shine through.