Inspiration Fridays! Does your creativity know its history?
Does your creativity know its history?
Today the veil is thin. Our creativity connects us with something ancient, something beyond ourselves. I was struggling to open an old tube of quinacridone with a small pair of pliers. As I twisted, the cap stayed put, but the side of the tube split wide and now the deep red paint is everywhere. A leak in time. I’m going to use a lot of red.
“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction,” – Pablo Picasso
This old paint in a tube has its own story of innovation. Oil paints first found their way into tubes all the way back in 1841. The American artist John Goffe Rand developed the collapsible metal tubes to keep his oil paints fresh. A game-changer for artists, as it made our paints more portable and the very act of painting itself more immediate and spontaneous.
Before that, artists had to grind their own pigments and mix them with oil before every painting session. I doubt I would be a painter if this were still true. When I’m ready to paint, even the act of putting out the paints feels like it takes too long. And forget painting outdoors (plein air).
I think my artistic lineage probably starts with the Impressionists. An impatient line of artists I’m unwittingly now a part of, each new brushstroke a response to visual whispers, urgings, and murmurs from derelicts and geniuses long dead but still very much alive.
The quiet before the storm.
Art is a collection of gestures, traces, and energies. Each decision, each mark is part of a shared visual alphabet, every completed work is an exchange. When we add something new, we’re honoring what’s come before, even when it’s an unconscious nod. It’s humbling to think that each of us, in some way, participates in this ongoing narrative, creating something that has the potential to live on beyond us. There’s a bit of immortality there, fragments of our experiences, our hands, our lives carried forward.
My daughter Iris is celebrating her 12th birthday today. I can’t help but see a bridge between her discovery of the world and what I experience as I continue to explore, looking for ways to bring both the past and the future into my work. Is that what art is? Our shared journey through time, holding reminders and pieces of everyone who has touched us in some way.