Beauty in the Process

"True artists are almost the only men
who do their work for pleasure."
-Auguste Rodin

I must begin this conversation with a simple question; why create? Why make art? Some artists claim that the beauty of art is in the concept, and not the physical. Others claim that they create merely for beauty itself. For the physical alone. Still others create for the sake of creation itself; the process. This is where Rowan Williams begins his dialogue on the relationship between art and beauty in his book Grace and Necessity.

  

Saint Thomas defined the beautiful as that which pleases; id quod visum placet. Or, intuitive knowledge, and a delight. Therefore, the beautiful gives delight in the act of knowing. Maritain summarizes this point in his book Art and Scholasticism, stating that 

“If a thing exalts and delights the soul by the very fact that it is given to the soul’s intuition, it is good to apprehend, it is beautiful.”

However, creating beauty cannot be the ultimate goal for the artist. An artist who strives to attain aesthetics alone will change and tweak the work until they have compromised the spirit of the piece in an attempt at beauty. Williams argues that instead of this vain path, an artist should create honestly - and that the transparency in the creation will lend itself to beauty. In the Mellon Lectures, Maritain discusses that the problems with contemporary art lie in emotionalism and intellectualism. Our current culture, centralized around functionalism, judges a work’s success merely by it’s ability to stimulate emotions or communicate what was on the artist’s mind. Appreciation for the power of the creative process has been lost and replaced by a rationalized version; the art cannot be successful unless it can be explained.

Many artist’s feel that their calling is to change the world with their art, in agreement with their own personal vision. But this “magical fallacy” is preventing the production of true, beautiful art. First and foremost, the artist must let go of their desires and find joy simply in creating, in the process. Therefore, art is essentially opposed to the will power of the individual. Beauty cannot be achieved by a conscious decision and intellectualism. Creativity and the production of beauty is a spontaneous, organic process which no person can deliberately choose.

"The artist is not called on to love God or the world or humanity, but to love what he or she is doing. In a rather extended sense, the activity of the artist does have a serious moral character simply because it pushes aside the ego and the desire of the artist as individual.” 
- Grace and Necessity, Rowan Williams

As an artist and creator myself, I find Williams dialogue on this subject matter to hold truth and comfort. With one foot in the world of academia, and the other in the realm of contemporary art, I often find that the joy of creation has been lost. I find I can let go of the joy of creating myself. But isn’t that the reason most of us began making art in the first place? I feel that often the modern art world tells us that the process is not enough - that the work must be intellectualized until the soul has been wrenched out of it. I have a lot of empty pieces in my studio. Not empty in the sense that they are blank, or unfinished, but in that they lack conviction. They lack the joy of the process. And how is the viewer supposed to find joy in a work if the artist themselves did not? 

A glimpse into my own creative process.

As I grow and progress as an artist, I am learning that my creativity comes from the process. While some artists plan and conceptualize, I find that my best and most beautiful work comes from getting my hands dirty - diving into the physical working - letting my hands tell that which my conscious thought and language does not know how to communicate. 

"The artist therefore is engaged in an intelligent making of a poem or other art form, seeking not Beauty nor to lay bare the underlying relations in the material nor any other program other than to make the material yield up, via the canons of artistic creation, its patterns discerned within the artist’s self. While propaganda or pornography or even philosophical ideas can be expressed artistically, these never yield art per se. And the artist seeking to make these is failing to be an artist, and the product, however artful, cannot be beautiful."
-Rt. Rev. Pierre W. Whalon, D.D., in review of Grace and Necessity

References

Grace and Necessity by Rowan Williams

Art and Scholasticism by Jacques Maritain

Grace and Necessity as reviewed by Rt. Rev. Pierre W. Whalon, D.D

(http://anglicansonline.org/resources/essays/whalon/GraceNecessityReview.html)