So, why do we do it? We wrestle with paint, clay or poetry to create that perfect design, that shape, that collage of textures and colours, or that perfect orchestration of words and phrases - why? What is it that drives us to agonise, to cudgel our poor overworked brains, to polish, to draft and redraft until we have achieved something as close as we can manage to the vision that lies before us, taunting us and drawing us on to create. We are artists, all of us, in our different ways. We create. It is in our nature. But why?
In her novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
grappled with this question of what it is that drives us to take disparate
objects, colours, shapes or even people and bring them together into order, to
create a thing of beauty. For Woolf, it is the bringing together of words that
drives her. Mrs Ramsay, modelled on the author's mother, brings people together
in the novel in a series of unforgettable moments and strives to create harmony
out of the chaos of everyday life.
For Lily Briscoe moments
must be made permanent on canvas. Paint is Lily's medium with which she
transforms the fluidity of life to the fixity and permanence of art. Deeply
aware of the struggles of her sex to count for something in the world that is
more than the inevitability of romance, marriage, child-bearing and
domesticity, Lily's work is her art. It is her reason for being. She knows that
her efforts to master artistic form 'roused one to perpetual combat, challenged
one to a fight in which one was bound to be worsted'. Nevertheless, she
persisted. 'Why then did she do it?' she asked herself.
Walking along the wooded
shores of one of our local estuaries, fascinated by the wintry outline of the
trees, the colours, the misty quality of the hills and the loneliness of the
landscape, I ask myself a similar question. Why do I feel this continual urge
to write what I see around me? What am I trying to achieve? What am I trying
to prove to myself? What is it that drives me? The more one looks, with the
eyes of an artist, at the world around us, the more one sees out there. Every
day brings new discoveries to the artist. The trees are no longer just 'brown
and green'. The lacy patterns of their outlines in winter are no longer dull
and depressing, but infinitely varied, as they stretch up their branches
against the subtle colours of a winter's sunset.
Painter, sculptor, wordsmith
alike, we are all the same in our painstaking search for that elusive design
which will make life stand still. Life moves too fast. Each moment, for the
artist, brings fresh cornucopias of impressions, fresh bounty, a superfluity of
beautiful moments to record. We are desperate to fix them on canvas, paper, stone,
or whatever medium we choose, lest they escape. "Slow down!" we cry. "Life,
stand still here!" But the infinite escapes us once more, finite mortals that
we are, and we are forced to try again.
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