Dorothy Sayers on the original vision

The original vision for the painting was this, drawn on the envelope of a bank statement. Compared with the final outcome, there is some likeness, but not much.

In the original impulse, I wanted to abstract the undulating fields of the Palouse into curved lines. The lines would be pronounced, acting somewhat like the cames (the black lines) of stained glass windows. So in the original vision, I saw something sectional; a kind of Mondrian with curves: solid colors each framed within lined boundaries.

The haziness of the outcome was not planned; it is something that the painting itself wanted to be.

But the tension between what I wanted, and what the painting wanted to be, left the work unfinished on my desk for weeks. I was tempted to discard it -- abort it -- and forget about it. It was only resignation (not inspiration) that brought me to finish it.

The process became more cheerful, although still suspenseful, when it occurred to me that it might have a direction of its own.

The whole exercise raises questions about the nature of creativity, about the creator and what is created. Does the artist "see" the thing whole ahead of time, and just bring it into being? For example, tradition tells us that Handel wrote the entire Messiah in 24 days, going almost non-stop, eschewing food. Upon completing the Hallelujah Chorus, it is said that he exclaimed he saw "all of heaven before me, and the great God Himself..."

But conversely we know that Beethoven struggled for years with some of his musical ideas before they took their final form in his compositions.

Here is Dorothy Sayers; she is writing about the literary art:

"The lay public ... rather like to believe this inspirational fancy; but as a rule the element of pure craftsmanship is more important than most of us are willing to admit. Nevertheless the free will of a genuinely created character has a certain reality, which a writer will defy at his peril. It does sometimes happen that the plot requires from its characters certain behavior, which, when it comes to the point, no ingenuity on the author's part can force them into, except at the cost of destroying them ... In such dilemmas, the simplest and worst thing the author can do is to behave like an autocratic deity ..."

Logos2Go

Dorothy Sayers, "Free Will and Miracle" in The Mind of the Maker (1941). Harper San Francisco, 1979, 67-68.

Ephesians 2.10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

See this for a traditional account of how Handel wrote the Messiah.