Artists Passion

In a day and age where mass marketing and production go hand in hand, it’s hard to imagine how creating a product can become a means to the ends of focusing on one’s process. Yet most mass manufacturers, at least the good ones who make a profit know the importance of getting down in clear form the order of assemblage required to quickly and efficiently create their product. Henry Ford knew that having his car manufacturing plant on the Rouge River would shorten the time it took for him to get materials. The proximity to the waterway allowed for a speedy delivery of the iron and other materials required for the assemblage of Ford Motor Cars. Historians see his decision as a work of brilliance.

Likewise the artist must ask what materials she or he needs to yield their artistic product in the most efficient and cost conscious manner. But the efficiency required, and the attention on cost has less to do with money, and more do with outlay of physical energy. For the artist, energy and time are important commodities that when kept in close observance provide her or him with the ability to make the money needed by anyone to live and thrive and practice their profession.

Whereas most professions and jobs require the employee or owner to find the shortest distance between two points to achieve their ends, the artist knows that she or he must always take a circuitous route, for it is in the turns and curves of this trek that the jewels of each piece of work are rendered for refinement. The artist’s first journey on the path to a new creation is that of discovery, and inevitably the artist must allow time for getting lost, taking intentional, if not spontaneous, detours. We must allow for this or else our work, whether it be a painting, story or novel or piece of music will sound or appear not just similar to other creations, but cookie cutter.

There’s nothing wrong with continually exploring the same themes in one’s work, but to travel the same path in those themes is plagiarism of one’s own previous creation. In fact this not creation, but essentially offering up the same story or song or painting just under a new name or in a different frame. And while agents and publishers and even music companies may encourage this as a way of ensuring strong sales, the artist’s muscles at creating begin to atrophy, and their audience having heard, seen or read it all before, moves onto something offering hopes of a change, even if it is with someone who has interpolated or re-invented/created the artist’s work in a new light.

For the sake of longevity, and maintaining passionate interest in her or his work, the artist must continually push the boundaries of their skills, purging deeper and farther into the nature of their art and the themes around which their paintings, writings and music swarms. As writer, Nicholas Sparks states, he writes about one theme, or subject—one man in love with one woman. The art of what he does, which is not easy, is to create as many stories exploring the theme of a one-woman man.

The artist then is much like a doctoral student in whatever subject, observing her or his subject from every angle possible and thus becoming a certified expert on it, such that when she or he sits before the committee reading their dissertation she or he will have gained a body of knowledge in this topic, not just from the didactic research completed, but the actual experience of toiling the subject around their minds, dreaming it in their hearts and souls, breathing and sleeping the subject such that it becomes like a second skin. And from this the student can answer the various questions, address the many comments with assurance and confidence in her or his process of research and discovery.