Artist's Credo

"It can be said that our talents are gifts from God and our use of our talents is our gift back to God. The degree of happiness we experience when working well, the sense of rightness and harmony, all argue that creativity is God's will for us. When we create, we work hand in glove with the Great Creator. Creativity is its nature and our own. We think--and manifest--from the mind of God within us.

"Artists throughout the centuries have known this and said this. They are not speaking in metaphor. Ours [Western, secularized modernity] is one of the few world cultures that does not routinely honor higher forces, and yet, working at our art, we do experience inspiration, although we may call it an intuitive hunch or leading. Something within us leads, and we follow. Painter Robert Motherwell speaks of the brushstroke taking the next brushstroke.

"All artists experience this form of leading when our ego has stepped aside and we follow our inner muse with a childlike innocence and enthusiasm. Time falls away. We spend hours at the easel or the page, and time seems to pass in minutes. We have entered another, spiritual dimension. With our ego set aside, we lose our sense of separation from the source. We experience a time of communion, a conscious contact with a power greater than ourselves. We have touched the Great Creator, experiencing it as a power within ourselves."

--Julia Cameron, The Sound of Paper: Starting from Scratch (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 257-58.

Comments

  1. WilliamFebruary 19, 2009 at 9:10 AM

    Your verbolatry is worthy of song but, I'll hum for you not being greatly dulcet, and God's gift to me is not a mellisonant voice.

    ReplyDelete

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