still-life apple (lovingly half-baked)
divinity resides in the hands; or a brief midnight ramble about art
i bought myself a book on a whim from the seattle Kinokuniya during one of my first weekends in the city after moving last june. it was called Automatic Eve, and one line struck me poignantly.
‘In your hands lives the art and spirit of the machine — of its creation. This is a rare thing. Knowledge lies, but art does not. Understand this — divinity resides in the hands.’
i think of this often — the art and fragile beauty of creation. the word ‘create’ derives from late Middle English (in the sense ‘form out of nothing’, used of a divine or supernatural being), and further from the latin root creare, to make or bring forth.
my first exposure to ‘art’ was as a child. i briefly took formal art lessons when i was very young. i learned how to sketch, to sit at an easel and stare at a plastic red apple placed astride a plain white cube, and to emulate what i saw. to some degree, i was learning the fundamentals, to learn how to observe and reframe something wholly real into the confines of a 2-dimensional page. but what if what i wanted to create wasn’t that apple at all? at most, the finished piece was a demonstration of my skill in replication, of how accurately my hatching could reproduce something that was already real, sterile in its unoriginality.
in the world of still-life, you are taught to conform, not to be free. and there is more to art than still-life, too. recently, i’ve spoken to several people who claim that they’re not ‘good artists’ or even artists at all because they were never adept at traditional fine-arts. i believe firmly there’s art and artistry in all things — to create is to bring forth art and beauty into the world, and that is something that anyone and everyone can and should do on their own terms, unconfined by conventional rigidity.
perhaps the idle thought is that art classes in primary and secondary education should be more flexible in their definition of what art really is, and that they should leave more room for imagination to breathe. for more children to grow up believing that they can be artists in all ways, and with an appreciation for the latent art in everything they do and everywhere in the world beyond. to look upon an arrangement of flowers on a coffee table, or a well-written proof, or the curve of a skateboard against the asphalt, or the joining of components as an assembly in fusion360, or the scattering of words on a page, and see that these all, and more, are imprints of the art of creation.
though years have passed since the last time i stared at an arrangement of geometric shapes and everyday objects, i still struggle with finding the freedom to create. i’m easily paralyzed facing an empty terminal or an empty notebook or an empty screen. i feel restless, often — my own mental dissonance stands at odds to the ideal of what i consider art more broadly to be, and why i think there is such a beauty in all things. but even that paralysis serves as a gentle reminder that from a blank canvas, there is no way but forward, and everything that comes next is already creation. and that, alone, is already beautiful.
to create altruistically and humbly is the closest to divinity we can be. so go forth! spread magic! create! as a closing thought, i give you an excerpt from Endymion, by John Keats, one of my favorite poems.
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness;
