Re-animating creative impulses
'draw them together into a little compass, and hold them still, so still'
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In my early 20s, I took ceramic classes at a warehouse down the block from my apartment. It was a dream warehouse.
The building was converted into a community space for artists and neighbors and friends to make their work. Its aesthetic was layered and felt like the 90s… it was the kind of space where you could forget that the internet even existed.
It’s what I thought art school would be like: buzzing with craft, color, and purposeful mess.
(Funny enough, my high school art teacher used to take me there in the evenings when I was still in high school—she’d take her fiber class and I’d take flameworking at the same time)
In this haven, I talked with a woman in her early 30s who was a full-time ceramic artist. I was struck by how much she built on similar ideas over and over until their nuances started to gain luminosity and depth.
I remember seeing her work and thinking about exhausting an idea versus re-animating an initial creative impulse.
Following a creative impulse and the intention to explore ‘repeated utterances’ in my body of work, I found myself unexpectedly crafting this video. It is a visual poem of sorts and under three minutes… And I so hope you enjoy it!
A couple weeks ago, I wrote a letter about this very thing. In it, I shared:
An iteration is a repeated utterance. It’s evoking the same thing in a thousand ways: painting the same painting in a thousand ways, dancing the same dance in a thousand ways, writing the same concept or narrative in a thousand ways. In other words, an iteration is the latest incarnation in your creative process.
If you’re inspired to share, I’d love to hear what questions or insights it stirs for you and what role (creative) courage is playing in your life right now…
Thank you for being here.
XO
Maggy
PS: Part of the creative impulse to make this video came from finding a leaf-shaped paper with a quote by Edward Carpenter excerpted from a larger poem. Here is the poem in full…
The Lake of Beauty (1883)
Let your mind be quiet, realising the beauty of the world,
and the immense, the boundless treasures that it holds in store.
All that you have within you, all that your heart desires,
all that your Nature so specially fits you for -
that or the counterpart of it waits embedded in the great Whole, for you.
It will surely come to you.
Yet equally surely not one moment before its appointed time will it come.
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All your crying and fever and reaching out of
hands will make no difference.
Therefore do not begin that game at all.
Do not recklessly spill the waters of your mind
in this direction and in that,
lest you become like a spring lost and dissipated in the desert.
But draw them together into a little compass, and hold them still, so still;
And let them become clear, so clear - so limpid, so mirror-like;
at last the mountains and the sky shall glass themselves in peaceful beauty,
and the antelope shall descend to drink and to gaze at her reflected image,
and the lion to quench his thirst,
and Love herself shall come and bend over and catch her own likeness in you.