The Courage to Create

I recently bought this painting of Kim Boekbinder (shown right) from artist La Gitana Katelan Foisy, shown left.

In Kim Boekbinder's In Between Everything, the mesmerizing artist makes the point:

"...just as art is the gap, art is also the void. I am learning to live with the emptiness, not to give in to it, not to submit to a depression or a fear. And when I can be empty, without trying to stuff myself full of anything and everything, that is when my best work begins."

In times of great anxiety it becomes difficult to pull this emptiness off, but it's a necessity.

In The Courage to Create by Rollo May, he argues that the process of creativity has encounter at its center. An artist doesn’t just depict a tree or a person, but rather a unique encounter with that object or individual. The depiction requires omissions and augmentation to match the artist’s imagination, or at least come as close to capturing that intangible vision as possible. This record, with its specific details, cannot exist until the effort is made to document and capture the intimacy of the encounter. The creative work endures far longer than the ephemeral encounter that inspired it and glazes it with new meaning that can be shared and even trigger a new reality. In order to be fully present for the encounter, emptiness is a necessity.

Encounter has two binary poles: being and non-being. In recording the encounter, a struggle with meaninglessness is undertaken. May warns that encounter can lead to anxiety, since it’s a mystery when it will occur or what it will invoke. In Giacometti, encounters led to rage, expletives, and anguish--but he was committed to enduring these consequences because doing so gave his life and work meaning.

At the root of all creation is the chasm between the idea generated by the encounter and the process of realization. Anguish is a part of this experience, because the self is altered and identity is threatened. Like Sisyphus, condemned to eternal rolling of a rock up a mountain only to watch it roll back down each time, the artist must find meaning in the anguish and process. The great lesson of the existentialists is to persist in the face of anguish and despair.

The forms that take shape below the surface are where the meaning of encounter lies. Anxiety must be confronted if the artist is to enjoy the work of creating a new global culture and economy. That energy can be used to shape a world, or a vision of it, that more closely matches the imagination. This is the first step toward making it real.

“Is there someplace where reality speaks our language--where it answers us if we but understand the hieroglyphics?” May asks. Creative people do not run away from non-being but rather wrestle with it and force it to produce being. They “knock on silence for an answering music and pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.”