The Urge to Create

A friend and I are planning on leading an urban sketching seminar at the beginning of Oktober and so the planning phase has begun. This is the first time I will have put together a materials list and I am trying to keep it both minimal and useful. I don't want people to have to buy doubles of what they already own but I want to offer a short list of supplies that will be nice to have once the seminar is over. With this in mind, I am carefully selecting a few watercolor pans in colors that don't belong to the normal predetermined sets.

   As I have been sifting through supplies, evaluating them with regard to their importance, portability, and usefulness I have also begun to reflect on the human urge to create. It is interesting that in a world, and especially in countries where everything necessary to life is available to us, often in such diversity of style, design, and function, we still long to be creative, to produce things with our own hands, in ways that are new or different from those around us. People with money enough for a thousand pictures will often still paint one, people with connections for the most beautiful objects will diy them. Obviously, there is a socio-economic element to the creative impulse, we long for beauty and comfort as well as for self-expression and creativity, and for many people in the world the means to acquiring beauty and comfort is the creation of it.  Yet even in instances where there is no desire for the good or beautiful there remains the human desire to be creative. We have used this impulse used both for great good and for great evil. We have, as humankind, created beautiful lives in the midst of the most hostile situations, consider nomadic peoples, but we have also devised the cruelest punishments and creative ways of dealing with those people and things we dislike.

    While we see complexity within the animal kingdom combined with skillfulness, consider the spiders spinning and repairing of its web daily, the creative element is glaringly absent. The animal uses skill and design to accomplish its life purpose or to perform necessary functions yet it is not playful in these pursuits. the Spider, for example, does not change the shape of its web from week to week to make it more interesting or appealing to itself. And if creativity to us is play, animals play in a very different way. One without visual, and varying results. This is then one aspect that sets humans apart from other parts of the animal kingdom, the desire to create.

  As artists, we take 'being creative' to the level of a full-time job. We are not creative in our jobs. We are creative for our job. Keeping this in mind the question arises, 'Are we contributing to creating a greater good?'

  In what way do you contribute to the greater good? Let me know in the comments below.

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