Artifact 6: Creative Spirituality

Objectives:

– Become familiar with ways in which spirituality influences artists

– Discuss the differences between spirituality and religion

– Examine spirituality as a generative force and a well spring for creativity

Original post: 

I do think this week’s reading helped me with understanding myself as an art student better, because it answered some essential and vital questions that made me struggling for a longtime. By reading the article The Mission of Art, I learned that there are many stages in the creative process that found by scientists, and the author Grey, A in his article trying to summarize the process as “Formulation, saturation, incubation, inspiration, translation, and integration.” (P.75) I think the way he summarized is interesting and I believe the most important stage for an artist in the creative process is inspiration.

In my opinion, when talking about one’s creativity, the most important part relates to it is the inspiration. In another word, inspiration sometimes determines one’s creativity in some way. As Grey said, “Every artist has his or her own unique process of inspiration.” (P.80) I totally agree his idea because from my own experience, I can tell that the way how I get ideas or inspiration is sometimes different from my classmates. For example, when I took the ceramic class I did not like to sketch and I always had no plan for my artworks. So I just followed my heart to do it, and the ideas and inspirations just came along with the progress when I built up my artwork. However, one of my friend really enjoyed doing sketches and she always plans ahead of what she’s going to build.

So I think inspiration is such an amazing process that its influences to artists is great. As Grey mentioned in his article, “Inspiration is beyond reason. (P.82)” and also “Inspiration is the most mysterious step in the creative process. The artist is possessed by a creative force, overtaken by a vision and driven to create.” (P.81). For me the saddest part of why inspiration is so important is that I can never make inspiration, but only can grab it when it comes.

Reflection:

xinxin(I photographed this glass art at a gallery in seattle. Artist: Dale Chihuly)

I chose this artifact because it helped me explore the importance of inspiration in the creative process, and it helped me extinguish the differences between spirituality and religion. Therefore, I can finally find a way to inspire myself in order to work better in the term of creating art. From this artifact, I understood that art just as spiritual practice, is a way people used to express emotional and rational feelings.

From my own experiences, I realized that no matter how hard working I was, without great inspiration my artwork would be so dull for me. However, great inspiration always brings excellent work. Grey states this in the article The Mission of Art; “…artists need to be able to see on each level in order to bring technical beauty, archetypal beauty, and spiritual beauty to their work.” (P. 73) So I believe that a good artist is the one, who has the sensitive to the environment, also has the ability to capture the inspiration beyond reasons.

When talking about the spirituality and religion, I still think they are two concepts that sometimes has shared meanings but totally different from each other. This artifact helped me to think of the importance of spirituality and religion, and I noticed that spirituality is more important than religion for me. Because I am kind of not belonging to any religion, but I do believe that spirituality exists inside of me and growing up along with me.

Future goals:

In the future I want to do some experiments to find a way of making inspiration for myself, because as an art student, it is hard to have great ideas all the time. So I need to find a way to relax myself or to trigger something as inspiration. For example, listening some music or reading books would be ways to make inspiration. Even though I doubt the possibility, I still want to give a try.

Bibliography:

Grey, A. (2001). Art as Spiritual Practice. The Mission of Art (1st ed., pp. 205-233). Boston & London: Shambhala.

Table of Contents:

Main Page

Artifact 1: First Blog Post- JR and His Exhibitions

Artifact 2: Life Values Assessment

Artifact 3: What is Art For?

Artifact 4: Is Food Art?

Artifact 5: The Art of Personal Adornment 

Artifact 6: Creative Spirituality

Artifact 7: Art, Games, and Technology Research

Artifact 8: Remixing Culture

Bibliography

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