The play-by-play during art-making

What's going on inside the artist during the act of art-making? This is an area where no camera can go, no reporter can espy, no companion can observe.

It is the most private of private worlds.

Even the artist doesn't exactly know what's going on while creating a work of art. This idea has early roots. For example, Plato noted that an inspired orator is inspired precisely because he is "out of his mind" -- controlled, instead, by something divine.

Does the artist "see" something whole, and then merely gives it visible (or audible) form as is?

In the movie Amadeus, the Mozart character composes with one hand while gently rolling a billiard ball with the other. The musical notation, as it were, simply comes out of him as if by automatic writing.

If you listen to Mozart's music, you believe this is true. The theologian Karl Barth once said something to the effect that, when we have Mozart's music, there's no need to wonder what heaven's like.

Or does the artist, in some way, "figure out" the rough inspirational impulse inside of him as the artwork takes shape in front of him? We might call this the sculpture analogy: making art is like carving out a block of solid rock; you chip away at the medium until there, in front of you, is an object of aesthetic delight.

This is how this piece of art, A day in the Palouse, came about. I started with quite another "look" in mind. But as I "chipped away" at it, it began to tell me what it really wanted to be.

A play-by-play commentary sort of thing went on inside of me while the artwork came into being. I mean play-by-play because, just like watching any sports event with commentary, I didn't know what the end result would be. There was a fair amount of suspense.

Now as I look at it -- in other words, now that this piece of art has been brought into the world, it has a life of its own, and I, like anybody else, have to get used to relating to it -- now as I look at it, I have gradually come to like it.

But it does not look like that original impulse I had for this work. That impulse is still stuck somewhere in the inner rooms of my being.

I don't think this is how God creates ex nihilo. Because if this is how He creates, it would raise enormous questions about His sovereignty and foreknowledge.

This whole thing, then, is a conversation between freedom and determination.

That is what art is, in a way: a living example of the tug-of-war between what a creator "wants" and what the work of art ends up to be.

I see it as a theological - aesthetic question.

But I see everything in these terms.

Logos2Go

Psalm 139.14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.

Ephesians 2.10 For we are his workmanship (the word here is "poetry"; as in we are his poetry), created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. I believe Barth's comment comes from his Church Dogmatics, but I don't have it in front of me. Here are many quotes by famous people about Mozart; several of the observations are by Barth.

Plato, Ion 532b-536b SOCRATES: I perceive, Ion; and I will proceed to explain to you what I imagine to be the reason of this. The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art, but, as I was just saying, an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, ... so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains...

A day in the Palouse, oil pastel on poster board