Craftwork

"The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep.  Something must be done with them."

Alfred North Whitehead

Everyone is creative with a small c through dreaming and language.  But Creativity with a big C is more than that.  Not just thinking out of the box but making a better box or maybe even a meta-box.  It is the making that matters and that transforms an insight from a private fiction into a public fact.  It is in actually manifesting our dreams that we become a human doing not a mere human being.

Of course, it would be nice if the activity of creating were only a matter of translating thoughts into objects.  A simple transcription…as if Scott Joplin merely wrote down the notes he heard in his head or Georgia O'Keeffe simply drew out her visions.  Too bad it is not that simple.  Creativity is work and sweat is the lubricant.  Enginuity is the mother of invention and that means hands-on working with the materials at hand. 

The movie The Agony and the Ecstasy has Charlton Heston as Michelangelo seeing the images of the Sistine Ceiling in the clouds.  Nice and breezy but as anyone who has struggled to make a thing knows, it is never just a matter of jotting down visions.  Michelangelo toiled on his back for years, fixing, changing, reworking.  O'Keeffe did not dream like that...she painted like that.  And painted and painted.  The creative idea – the concept – is crucial but only the beginning.  Making a new thing has to happen in the hard world with all its gravity and grime.  To be creative is to understand the materials you must craft in order to turn your dream into your project.

Even dreaming itself, our common creative talent, requires a craft…namely, storytelling.  Telling your dream to someone else turns it into a creative outcome and the simple use of the word and to tie together dream images is part of the craft of making the dream a reality.  The word and becomes the needle and thread of the storytale and the separate images of the dream become a coherent project including organizing the elements, keeping the listener's attention, giving a performance in voice and gesture.  In other words, the oral craft of narration. 

Creativity with a big fat C requires craft as well.

Painters, for instance, face the daunting challenges of the painting craft - the laws of color, the graphics of shape and line, the qualities of the canvas, society's expectations, the evolution of pictures up to their own time and place.  Each painting is a struggle – win, lose or draw – with the laws of the universe of painting.

Everything has its craft and anyone making anything must be aware of it.  The ceramicist throwing a pot is limited by the physics of clay, the laws of force and gravity, and the geometry of structures.  Not to mention cultural, religious, financial and a host of other influences.  With all this weighing down, it is a difficult and noble effort to make a new thing.  On the other hand, as history shows, human ingenuity is a fair match for all of it because within these limits, marvels are born.

Creative work is, in large part, the mastery of the methods of making a thing and that takes time.  It is seldom as swift as a vision in the clouds.  A journey of a thousand miles may begin with the first step but the real challenge is the thousands of other damn steps.  Arthur Rubenstein at the age of 80 said that after seventy years of performance he was just now learning how to really play the piano.  And the great Japanese painter Hokusai said that having mastered flowers, birds, and mountains he was hoping to soon learn to paint people.  He was 90 years old at the time.  The good news is that craft is ageless and so is creativity.

So a sprig of craftwork goes into the Ingenarium, the ability to be aware of and work within the rules of a medium, the urge to know your materials, to understand their limits and their potential.  And while we are at it, with a nod to how long it takes to learn a craft, we should also toss in a nice sprig of longevity.