Phoebe Kate

A few days ago, I blogged about how all creative works — art, architecture, writing, music, whatever — reflect the creator of it.  It’s inevitable.  It comes from somewhere deep inside you.  And as you paint it or sculpt it or write it or compose it or design it, it is an expression of you.

And then, after you’ve done the best you can with it, something happens.  Like human children, you gestate it and birth it and work with it and when the process is complete, one day (usually to your surprise) it stands independently and becomes an entity unto itself apart from you and hopefully speaks to people you never imagined would be touched by what you made. 

As Geof Huth, a contemporary visual poet, states: “Art is created and supported by human beings, so the systems of their lives (their biographies, their interrelationships, their artistic and personal tendencies) are important to art in general…  Art, though, has to survive on its own. It has to exist as an esthetic experience on its own.”

There’s an odd experience that happens sometimes when you look at something you’ve created after several years have elapsed.  I’ll be rummaging through my files and run across some forgotten story or poem that was published 5 or 10 years ago that I frankly don’t even recall writing.  I’ll read it — the inexorable inner critic ready, of course, to wince at all its shortcomings and want to tear it up or rewrite it – and I’ll sit there, shaking my head in astonishment as I keep returning to the first page to stare in disbelief at the byline, and say, ”I wrote that?”

That’s the moment you realize, when time and emotional detachment have given you a different perspective, that artistic works are far more than just appendages of your personality and experience, but have a life force of their own that surpasses your talent and skill at the moment of creation.

Geof Huth has an interesting blog – check out his sandglyphs on California beaches.  Very cool.

–phoebe kate