Creative art, being based on freedom and originality

Creative art, being based on freedom and originality, knows no boundaries except those inherent within itself and the limitations necessary to quality, which we label unity. It plays no favorites with styles or isms. It is a timeless gauge for measuring art of ancient, modern, or future days, including all significant, creative, and more or less unified human expressions of the material and spiritual world in which we live.

Actually the term creative art is redundant, because no expression is really art unless it is creative. But owing to the widespread ignorance concerning art and imitation, the term is used here as a label for the authentic as against the false.

To create is to select or invent elements significant to a given purpose and organize them into a new and unique form. It means originality. It means individuality. It means freedom of action. The opposites of creation in art are imitation, academicism, intellectual and emotional slavery. Creativeness depends on a certain attitude of mind. It is democracy in practice -- an invitation to free thinking, exploration, and progression. Its opposite, imitation, spells conformity, reaction, and decadence.

Merely to set up a mirror to nature is not enough. To imitate is to transfer the object or view from one place to another. In doing this, nothing is said. Taking an image from one place and transplanting it (either all or in part) to another place neither communicates nor gives meaning. It merely says,"There it was; now it is here." It gives room neither for individuality, for organization, for expression of mood, nor for meaning.

As an index of surface facts, naturalistic imitation has its uses, as in anatomical charts for medicine, backdrop curtains for natural history exhibits, advertising illustrations, or even portrait painting. But to imitate nature or man-made works is not art, but a craft. It is possible that any of these things might be done in a creative, nonimitative manner and therefore be works of art. It depends solely on how it is done.

To be imitative requires no originality of thought or emotion, but merely practice in the craft of copying.

It is the easy way. To be creative is the hard way (until the individual expressive powers are trained to work freely at least), but it is the only worth-while way. In it there are room and need for personal feeling, thought, and imagination.

The creative artist may use forms quite natural in appearance if he redesigns them, rearranges them, and gives them significance through selection, simplification, and organization, or he may use non. objective, abstract, or semiabstract forms to express inner moods, ideas, meanings, or abstruse beauties.

At this point we shall digress momentarily to make clear what we mean by the terms naturalism,realism, and abstraction. It is outlined the traditional creative field, including three general categories-realism, abstraction, and nonobjectivism. Naturalism is shown outside this field because, being merely imitation, it is not a legitimate form to be used by the creative artist. Realism represents that kind of art which uses natural forms but modifies and reorders them to some more or less slight extent for purpose of design. At the other end of the scale is the term abstraction, which denotes a greater or nearly total departure from ordinary visual aspects of nature. By some the term abstract or abstraction is used to define the latter, as well as that art in which there are no conspicuous references to nature at all. In order to distinguish between the two degrees of abstraction we shall call the total-abstract kind of art nonobjective, which is not a perfect term but is probably the most often used of the several like ones, nonfigurative,nonrepresentational, and so on. At other times, when speaking of more or less abstract types of work generally, we shall use the word abstraction.

The area covered by abstraction and realism are so wide that in order to be at all specific one needs to use a modifying adjective with the terms, as in the designations modified realism, designed realism, semiabstraction, near-abstraction, and so on.

To return to the subject of the creative attitude, the artist may interpret the obvious, outward, realistic aspect or meaning of things, or he may go deeper into the spiritual and emotional values which the eye alone cannot see; but whichever he chooses to do, the work must be structurally organized. Whether realistic or abstract, the artist must clarify the expression of what he feels or knows about the subject by extracting certain significant things, recreating, dramatizing, simplifying, diagraming, and symbolizing.

The finished work must be judged on its own merits -- on its own grounds, as a complete expression of an idea, mood, or abstract beauty as felt, seen, or imagined by an individual creator.

The following exact transcript from an early edition of Webster's dictionary perfectly sets down the attitude of the creative mind and suggests the need for such:

Imagination: The will working on the materials of memory; not satisfied with following the order prescribed by nature or suggested by accident it selects the parts of different conceptions or objects of memory, to form a whole more pleasing, more beautiful, more terrible or more awful than has ever been presented in the ordinary course of nature.

"But," we can hear someone say, "isn't nature perfect? Have we a need or a right to change its visual aspects for the purposes of art?"

Part of the answer is that nature is perfect only in basic principle, or in single units, but seldom in mass or from any one point of view. Where several forms are seen together, it is an exception when they are found to be in good geometrical relation one to another. So for reasons of unity, nature must be reorganized and rearranged, the principles of unity emphasized, dramatized, and exaggerated. Spacial contours must be changed to show variety, interest, and harmony in relation to other masses. Volumes and planes must be drawn out one from another by accentuated contrasts of light-dark and color, rearranged in space positions for reasons of delineation, harmonic relationship, and eye appeal. In this same way all the elements must be emphatically reordered and redesigned.

Furthermore, the outward physical aspect of nature is only one of the facets for artistic expression or interpretation. Decoration, expression of the inner spirit and emotions and of the subconscious, and expression of nonobjective beauties are some of the other divisions. As for the right to change natural visual aspects, man is more important than any other known part of nature, and he has the right -- more, the duty to use nature in any way that serves a constructive purpose. At one time it was considered a sacrilege to tamper with nature at all. This right is seldom challenged any more in medical and other scientific practice. Nor should it be in the arts.