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These words are not my own and I take no credit for them. I share them here as a resource for anyone seeking personal growth or as source material for their own creative expansion of the collective.
Conflict consists in the fact the two forces are at war within him: on the one hand, justified longing of the ordinary man, for happiness, satisfaction and security, and on the other, a ruthless passion for creation, which may go so far as to override every personal desire. He usually must pay dearly for the divine gifts of creative fire.
Artistic sublimation is a process that gives form to love and loss.
The artist is not a person endowed with freewill who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is ‘man’ in a higher sense – he is ‘collective man’, a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind.
The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself in the genesis of the act of thinking and thought itself. Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.
… all of life, including the Self, is a third-force product of creative energy generated by the interaction between opposites - for which your masculine and feminine drives are metaphors. Even you are a third-force product of your parents' interactions. When you (your ego) consciously interact with your Couple, your instinct for creativity will fully awaken and you, too, will generate new life. Material, psychological, spiritual, whatever forms they take, the innovations you create are your soul's contribution to evolving life.
This is, then, the source of human creativity: The Trinity finds a home in the human personality.
Your insecure ego blocks your fullest creative potential. It might trick you into believing you aren't remotely creative. Or that you should use your creativity in the same old ways, even if you no longer find them fulfilling. Or you should try new ways that don't really appeal to you. Conflicts like this are between your ego, which wants to impress the world and fears its judgment, and your Couple, which compels you to develop your creativity no matter what others think.
Finding heart and passion within oneself is at the core of creative life and bids us to develop the courage to be compassionate with ourselves and others as we create. Responding to the call to create is not an isolated act. Creativity entails conversation with all beings in the wild and wondrous weaving of relationships that is the cosmos.
But this wasn't enough to sustain the need for artistic expression. I believe that if you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts, they will turn on you, or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned.
Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be consummated.
Here the torment of creation is lessened; creativity and play are close together.
The modern artist, after all, seeks to create art out of the unconscious.
Creative ideas … show their value in that, like keys, they help to "unlock" hitherto unintelligible connections of facts and thus enable man to penetrate deeper into the mystery of life.
… there, is still too much unwillingness on the part of the individual to apply to himself and his life the conclusions that can be drawn from art, although he might be ready to accept them in art. The artist can often express many things, unconsciously and without awakening hostility, which are resented when they are expressed by a psychologist (a fact that could be demonstrated even more conclusively in literature than in the visual arts). Confronted by the statements of the psychologist, the individual feels directly challenged; but what the artist has to say, particularly in our century, usually remains in an impersonal sphere.
Only now is the great rift that set in with modern art (between "great abstraction" and "great realism") being made conscious and on the way to being healed.
It is a great temptation for the painter of today to paint the pure rhythm of his feeling, the most secret pulse of his heart, instead of embodying it in a concrete form. That, however, leads only to a desiccated mathematics or a kind of abstract expressionism, which ends in monotony and a progressive impoverishment of form… But a form that can reconcile man with his world is an 'art of communion' by which man, at any moment, can recognize his own unformed countenance in the world.
What we have to reconquer is the weight of lost reality. We must make for ourselves a new heart, a new spirit, a new soul, in the measure of man. The painter's true reality lies neither in abstraction nor in realism, but in the reconquest of his weight as a human being. At present non figurative art seems to me to offer the one opportunity for the painter to approach the inward reality of himself and to grasp the consciousness of his essential self, or even of his being. It is only by the reconquest of his position, I believe, that the painter will be able, in the time to come, to return slowly to himself, to rediscover his own weight and so to strengthen it that it can even reach the outward reality of the world.
Until recently, the sculptor aimed at full sensual and powerful forms. But for the last 15 years, sculpture prefers forms in disintegration.
As soon as art has to express fear, it must of itself depart from the classical ideal.
… I believe that we are approaching the end of the world. In every figure, I strove to express a deepening fear and despair. In this way I am attempting to symbolize the last stage of a dying myth, the myth of the individual, victorious hero, of the humanist's man of virtue.
Very early in life I felt that man was ugly. The animals seemed to be more lovely and pure, yet even among them I discovered so much that was revolting and hideous that my painting became more and more schematic and abstract.
The more horrifying this world becomes (as it is in these days) the more art becomes abstract; while a world at peace produces realistic art.
The artist is, as it were, not so free in his creative work as he may think he is. If his work is performed in a more or less unconscious way, it is controlled by laws of nature that, on the deepest level, correspond to the laws of the psyche, and vice versa.
… in merely abstract paintings, the world of the known has completely vanished. Nothing is left to form a bridge to the unknown. On the other hand, these paintings reveal an unexpected background, a hidden sense. They often turn out to be more or less exact images of nature itself, showing an astounding similarity with the molecular structure of organic and inorganic elements of nature. This is a perplexing fact. Pure abstraction has become an image of concrete nature.
For the artist, the dialogue with nature is the conditio sine qua non of his work. (an indispensable and essential action, condition, or ingredient)
My hand is entirely the instrument of a more distant sphere. Nor is it my head that functions in my work; it is something else …
… the secretly perceived is made visible.
It is the artist's mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret ground where primal law feeds growth. Which artist would not wish to dwell at the central organ of all motion in space-time (be it the brain or the heart of creation) from which all functions derive their life? In the womb of nature, in the primal ground of crea-tion, where the secret key to all things lies hidden?. . . Our beating heart drives us downward, far down to the primal ground.
The impact of the acute angle of a triangle on a circle is actually as overwhelming in effect as the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo.
Form, even if it is quite abstract and geometrical, has an inward clang; it is a spiritual being with effects that coincide absolutely with that form.
The artist's eye should always be turned in upon his inner life, and his ear should be always alert for the voice of inward necessity. This is the only way of giving expression to what the mystic vision commands.
Behind changing natural forms there lies changeless pure reality.
The artist does not ascribe to the natural form of appearance the same convincing significance as the realists who are his critics. He does not feel so intimately bound to that reality, because he cannot see in the formal products of nature the essence of the creative process. He is more concerned with formative powers than with formal products.
Have we not learned from a thousand years of experience that things cease to speak the more we hold up to them the visual mirror of their appearance? Appearance is eternally flat . . . .
The art that is coming will give formal expression to our scientific conviction.
It is now realized that a state of schizophrenia and the artistic vision are not mutually exclusive. To my mind, the famous experiments with mescaline and similar drugs have contributed to this change of attitude. These drugs create a condition accompanied by intense visions of colors and forms not unlike schizophrenia. More than one artist of today has sought inspiration in such a drug.
The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.
…there is no "back to where you came from" for the creative mind whose unconscious has been involved in the fundamental dilemma of modern existence.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were the first to teach the deep significance of the senselessness of life, and to show how this senselessness could be transformed into art . . . . The dreadful void they discovered is the very soulless and untroubled beauty of matter.
Every object has two aspects: The common aspect, which is the one we generally see and which is seen by everyone, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals see at moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical meditation. A work of art must relate something that does not appear in its visible form.
An object awakens our love just because it seems to be the bearer of powers that are greater than itself.
The object expands beyond the bounds of its appearance by our knowledge that the thing is more than its exterior presents to our eyes.
It is common things that reveal those forms of simplicity through which we can realize that higher, more significant condition of being where the whole splendor of art resides.
From the psychological standpoint, the two gestures toward the naked object (matter) and the naked non-object (spirit) point to a collective psychic rift that created its symbolic expression in the years before the catastrophe of the First World War. This rift had first appeared in the Renaissance, when it became manifest as a conflict between knowledge and faith. Meanwhile, civilization was removing man further and further from his instinctual foundation, so that a gulf opened between nature and mind, between the unconscious and consciousness. These opposites characterize the psychic situation that is seeking expression in modern art.
The disturbing object — that is the first step to art.
The art of today embodies the spiritual matured to the point of revelation. The forms of this embodiment may be arranged between two poles: (1) great abstraction; (2) great realism. These two poles open two paths, which both lead to one goal in the end. These two elements have always been present in art; the first was expressed in the second. Today it looks as if they were about to carry on separate existences. Art seems to have put an end to the pleasant completion of the abstract by the concrete, and vice versa.
What really matters, of course, is (and always has been) the direct encounter with the work of art.
It is the aim of the modern artist to give expression to his inner vision of man, to the spiritual background of life and the world.
Every epoch is given its own measure of artistic freedom, and even the most creative genius may not leap over the boundary of that freedom.
The great artists do not seek their forms in the mist of the past, but take the deepest soundings they can of the genuine, profoundest center of gravity of their age.
Nobody paints as he likes. All a painter can do is to will with all his might the painting his age is capable of.
My starting point is the psychological fact that the artist has at all times been the instrument and spokesman of the spirit of his age. His work can be only partly understood in terms of his personal psychology. Consciously or unconsciously, the artist gives form to the nature and values of his time, which in their turn form him.
Any powerful work of art invades our being, and changes it forever. The British critic George Steiner claims that art, like certain kinds of religious and metaphysical experience, is the most “ingressive", transformative summons available to human experiencing’. It is an intrusive, invasive indiscretion that ‘queries the last privacies of our existence’; an Annunciation that ‘breaks into the small house of our cautionary being, so that 'it is no longer habitable in quite the same way as it was before'. It is a transcendent encounter that tells us, in effect: 'change your life’.
Artists, poets and musicians can only become fully creative if they work from this inner core of peace and integrity.
Such things cannot be thought up, but must grow again from the forgotten depths if they are to express the deepest insights of consciousness and the loftiest intuitions of the spirit, thus amalgamating the uniqueness of present-day consciousness with the age-old past of humanity.
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