Art, Beauty, Creativity and Inspiration #2: Inspiration and Creativity
A Christian Understanding
This is the second in a four-part series in which I explore the nature of art and beauty, and their place in Christian life and culture. Last week, I asked the foundational question: What is art? - and argued that good art is the product of a creative act ordered toward beauty and a good purpose, and that it can be Christian even without an explicitly religious subject. This week, I go deeper, examining how, if all good art is inspired by God, we know inspiration when it comes. I discuss where good ideas come from, how the imagination and memory shape the creative act, and why copying the masters is not mere imitation but genuine formation. I will also look at the distinction between figurative, abstract, and decorative art, and then turn to the most important question of all - what does beauty actually do to us, and why does it always point us beyond itself toward God? In the posts that follow, I will take up the harder questions: how we know what is beautiful, why tradition is our surest guide, and whether beauty is really just a luxury we can’t afford.
The Traditional Process of Art Creation
Because I am a painter and painting is what I know best, these discussions will focus, for the most part, on visual art - paintings, sculptures, and mosaics, for example, which are created to engage and appeal to us through their visual appearance. For such words of art, if they are good and Christian, their beauty is intrinsic to their purpose and to the reason for their creation by a good artist. For example, an icon might be painted to direct our thoughts to contemplation of a saint’s life during prayer, but if it is not beautiful, it will not fulfill this purpose effectively.
The beauty of such objects can arise from a number of different things, as we shall discuss shortly, but typically we call a work of art beautiful when we delight in its appearance because we recognize the skill used by the artist, the grace and beauty he employs in its creation, the goodness of any message it communicates to us, the goodness of its overall purpose, and how well it fulfills that purpose.
The traditional understanding of the process by which a good work of art is created is as follows: The original idea arises in the mind of the artisan or artist—that is, the one who makes art—and, deciding that he has good reason to do so, he fashions matter at his disposal in conformity to that idea.
In this sense, all art is representative, as it represents an idea or image that first occurs in the artist’s imagination or in his mind’s eye.
Where do good ideas come from? The primary source of the idea is information derived from the senses, usually something the artist has already seen and remembered, or something viewed directly. This might be a landscape that he is looking at as he paints, or another image or painting that he is copying. But the aspect of the imagination is never absent from the production of art. Even when a painting is based on reality—for example, a portrait or a landscape—the final product will be an integration of the reality before the artist and memories of similar experiences and images, presented through the artist’s imagination. The way images from memory are integrated into the painting shapes their individual style. Therefore, in traditional artist training, when the goal is to form an artist to paint in a particular tradition, say iconography, copying the works of past masters is always part of the program of study. The intention is to fill the student’s memory with images deemed artistically desirable or useful and to influence the imagination.
Figurative, Abstract, and Decorative Art
We have said that all art must represent an idea or image that existed first in the artist’s mind. Sometimes this idea is based on a prototype, a material entity that we would recognize instantly, such as a man or a landscape. We might call this figurative art. Sometimes, however, the art may be more abstract and can manifest ideas of spiritual or non-material truths through symbolism and signs.
There is a longstanding tradition of Christian ‘abstract’ art that is highly decorative and beautiful, containing a carefully worked-out symbolic language. An example of this is the geometric-patterned art on a Gothic church floor. Such geometric patterns embody mathematical symbolism that, for example, speaks to the prototypes of scripture. An octagon, for example, can symbolize Christ as the ‘eighth day’ of Creation.
Not all abstract art is so symbolic. Even non-figurative decorative art, intended to delight through its beauty and without explicit symbolic content, directs us to God simply because it is beautiful. The beauty of this decorative art arises from its resemblance, through the combination of shapes and colors, to the beauty of the cosmos.
Beautiful Christian decorative art is ‘abstract’ in the true sense of the word. It manifests the underlying order of the cosmos, which has been abstracted, that is, drawn out from the matter in which the order was observed, and represented in some other way in the design of the art.
More about Beauty: Beauty is the Light of Christ, and It is a Sign of Him
Beauty is a quality that calls us to itself and then beyond to the source of all beauty, who is God. In this sense, it wounds us by creating a desire for something we cannot have. When we observe a beautiful sunset, we admire it, but part of us remains dissatisfied, wanting more. We become aware in some sense that something is missing, something that is even more noble and beautiful than the sunset.
This desire for something more is, in its purest expression, a desire for God which has been awakened in us by the beauty of the created world. Recall our picture of the gradually darkening rings of light in the mandorla in our discussion of the Transfiguration icon in a previous post (see The Icon of the Transfiguration as the Symbol of Cultural Transformation). The rings of the mandorla encircle Christ like the concentric layers of an onion. All that is beautiful, but which is not Christ himself, sits, figuratively speaking, somewhere on one of these rings and directs our attention inwards towards Christ, who either created or inspired this beauty. A beautiful work of art, by virtue of its beauty, always directs us to Christ, the Beautiful One. Even if a work of art is not an image of Christ Himself, it directs us to Christ if it is beautiful, because Christ is the perfection of that beauty. For example, a painting might draw us to the beauty of the cosmos by depicting a landscape, and, in turn, reflecting on it, we might be moved to praise the Creator who made it.
Beauty always speaks to us of another world and another time, and simultaneously, of all time and all worlds, for it speaks of heaven and eternity. It is a perceptible sign of the invisible God.
Love it.
Heavy emphasis on imagination as that precedes all things beautiful (art, music, poetry, literature, architecture)
https://athanatospneuma.substack.com/p/the-neville-goddard-method-2-awakened?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
I love that particular St. Luke painting!