Creativity Sources
Nasher Sculpture Center, located in downtown Dallas, displays many modern sculptures. I visited there several times, and I was always interested in the sources of the artists' creativity. The most impressive art works to me were Head of a Woman and Quantum Cloud.
Picasso created Head of a Woman, a sheet-metal sculpture, with the idea of his wife. The head consists of two (or maybe four) mental plans. The two orthogonally crossed planes create eight planes. Each plane is painted with different parts of the head. Through the point of view from one plane to another, viewers can construct a distorted head. It is very interesting that viewer can see different small images of the head from different positions. These images implicitly portray multiple personalities.
Quantum Cloud XX (Tornado) is a very special figure. People are always dazzled by the blurring figure created by the diffused field of welded steel bars. They wonder how the artist can think of this idea. Many people tell me that this figure reminds them of the transferring mechanism used in Enterprise, the spaceship in Star Trek. However, Antony Gormley created the figure based on his own body with his interest in physics. According the note board in Nasher Sculpture Center, the piece also draws heavily on Gormley's experience with transcendental meditation. "By focusing the attention on the body through meditation" he (Antony) notes "I experienced consciousness at the center of a transitive field of energy."
Artists express themselves with creativity. In the museum, I wondered about the source of their creativity. Recently I found the answer from my latest drawing project. For this project, I needed to make a painting using juxtaposition, which means putting things which are not similar next to each other. Coincidentally, worries and fear grasp my heart due to the uncertainty of my career and relationships during these days. I was also surprised about what I have experienced in the States. Therefore, the words, "love hurts," "scream," "home town happiness," and "forgotten man" repetitively came to mind. I then tried to discover the clues in my life. I found "home town happiness" from my pictures taken in Taiwan, "forgotten man" with replacement of picture of a lazy man from my study of expressionism, and "scream" from one of the Munich's paintings. I created "love hurts" by imagining a faded love angel in the stars. Then I put these four elements together by using computer. Considering the composition, I finished the draft by weaving these objects together smoothly with aesthetic concepts. Finally, I began to paint. When I was painting values, I felt the onset of sentimentality. I suddenly thought of a question: how can I express these uncertain feelings in the painting? "Faces, yes", I murmured. Maybe expressions of faces could deliver the message. There were three faces in my composition: my face, the face of the lazy man, and the face in Munich's painting. These faces would be the iconographies of fear, nerve and sentiment respectively.
Creativity sometimes results from accidental events. Many people believe that ideas emerge because of unexpected events. For example, I, for no reason, thought of the four objects for the painting one day when I waked up in the morning. I, for no reason, also had many innovative ideas for my patent applications at this time. However, creativity also comes from more diverse experiences. For my latest painting, if I had not come to the States and experienced the stressful uncertainty, I would never have created the painting and thus would not now understand the anxiety in Munch's painting.
Copyright © 2005 by Joseph CJ Lee
<< Home