May believes they function as the beginning of the creative process, 'for the creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.' Many believed that isolation best enables this struggle, from poet Rupi Kaur, who advises 'love your isolation,' to journalist Sylvain Tesson, who fled to Siberia to escape '15 kinds of ketchup.'Away from the dirge of society, what Mary Oliver called 'the world's busyness,' we are able to focus on the inner processes that make art-and self-possible. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.ĭisorienting acts not only develop the self. According to the artist, the glass figure signifies the fragile, isolated, constructed semblance of the artist's ego. This is a process that goes on continuously. The self is made up, on its growing edge, of the models, forms, metaphors, myths, and all other kinds of psychic content which give it direction in its self-creation. In this isolation, we form both art and ourselves. To me, the act of creation is more instrumental to what I think of as 'art' than the aesthetics.Ĭonsequently, this separation brings conflicting results like disorientation and even alienation-what thespian Anna Deavere Smith called 'an excruciating sense of aloneness.' Ceramics, for example, will include marks and rubs of the artist, intentional or not. I prefer art that shows the existence of the creator. May echoes something written by German critic Walter Benjamin in the latter's essay 'Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.' Benjamin essentially concluded that art cannot be separated from its place, time, and culture of creation. Hence the poem or the painting is unique, original, never to be duplicated. The greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced but that it portrays the artist's or the poet's vision cued off by his encounter with the reality. The beginnings of this fear, agues May in The Courage to Create, is that creativity requires an abandonment of process, habits, and even society. 'Study for a Portrait' by Francis Bacon, 1952, Bacon's distortion of an unnamed man in a suit is also entitled 'Businessman.' Learn more.

The Courage to Create by Rollo May