(no subject)

[jinian]

I love reading Charles de Lint. I start thinking in myth.

I've also been thinking about my creativity, partly because of nanowrimo and partly because of lampworking class. I feel kind of unworthy a lot of the time because I am primarily an input person and I don't have a lot of Big Creative Ideas. It occurred to me that in the past an artistic person could spend a whole lifetime working on gargoyles or mosaic edging, and that maybe I am an embellisher instead of a builder. I might sometimes have ideas for the whole cathedral, but putting beauty into the world doesn't have to happen on a grand scale. It's perfectly okay to need a jumping-off point; it doesn't mean I'm less creative, just differently so.

I'm not entirely convinced yet, but I think this is a good thing to consider.

Comments

[rosefox]

I don't know anyone who commits art without some kind of inspiration. Sometimes the inspiration is external, sometimes internal; makes no difference to me. I still call it "art". And it's still beautiful.

Most of my musical inspiration is internal, and most of my knotwork expiration is external, for the record.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

That is somewhat validating but not really what I mean. :) I see your knotwork as analogous to my jewelry-making -- at least in result, I don't know how it feels to you -- but I don't do anyhting that is similar to making songs, where there is nothing to start with, or only uncombined elements, and something with a structure and presence exists when I'm done. If I were very musical, I think it might be as though I couldn't write songs from scratch but could create harmonies or arrange existing songs.

I want to make a thing whole in itself. I guess I used to do it with clay sometimes, but I feel like that was an outgrowth of messing about until I had enough randomness to choose a seed. I never have an inspiration just from me, and I feel like if one is a Real Artist one is supposed to have that.

[rosefox]

I don't know what kind of jewelry you make, so I can't discuss that in very much detail, but... if what you do is starting out with a pile of wire and string and beads and ending up with jewelry, that's very much like what my songwriting is like. I start out with a pile of notes and harmonies and rhythms and end up with music. There is something to start with; I wouldn't be able to write music the way I do if I didn't listen to so much.

The only difference between that and my knotwork design is that it's less of a direct connection. With the knotwork, I see something and move directly from that to a pattern ("Oh, look, a Kokopelli! I bet I could make a Kokopelli pattern"). With the music, all my combined musical knowledge collects in my brain, and then I decide that I want to write in a certain mood, and riffle through my memories of other music that's brought on that mood ("Hmm, it's chilly and autumnal. That would be a sort of brisk minor melody"); or words that I've encountered put themselves together and I write music for them in the same fashion, like "Spare Change". It's still work. I've only very rarely experienced anything like a song appearing, complete, in my head. And the last time I got a full-blown chorus that way, I examined the melody closely and realized it was borrowed wholesale from someplace else.

I don't see arranging harmonies or arranging beads as fundamentally different from arranging notes or arranging words. It's just a matter of what you've encountered and what's implanted itself in your brain. I just know how music goes, because I listen to so much of it. I know how sentences are built because I've read thousands and thousands of them. The way that melodies and sentences and verses and rhythms and rhymes go together just... makes sense to me.