Creativity: Happy Sunday!

"If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!" Jesus.

There is a major outdoor sculpture exhibit at Laudholm Farms this summer. Close to 100 works spread through the fields and along the trails. This sheet iron cut-out is placed naturally as part of a group of deer, two adults and a fawn, in the fields below the main trail, created by Wendy Klemperer. I took the image with a 600mm lens to get the close up, but it is far enough from the trail that you have to look twice to tell they are not real deer. I am impressed by the artistic creation in this work. With nothing to work with but a a flat sheet of metal and, I assume, a band saw, the artist has managed to create the impression of a fully rounded, living creature...one of the most graceful in North America...the White-tailed Deer. You would think, given the medium and the method, that it would look skeletal, but it looks anything but. It looks alive!

I believe that creative artists, no matter their medium...words, notes, pigments, stone, metal, light or motion...in their best moments, are in touch with the one creative spirit that is behind all that lives and all that is. The act of human creation, in those works that truly move us, is the act of channeling creation itself...the energy, the life, the love...that gives form to the all in all. A work like this, that captures the essence of the deer, comes out of the same energy that creates the deer itself...and we see and appreciate what the artist has managed. 

I don't mean to take anything away from the human artist...or to diminish the talent required to create a work like this. It requires skill, patience, and practice beyond what most of us are capable of...but it requires, most of all, surrender to creative spirit. Without that surrender, no amount of skill, patience, or practice would sufice to turn a flat sheet to metal into a living deer. And without the skill, patience, and practice of the artist, despite any surrender, still all we would have is flat metal. Artistic creation is a cooperation. 

The generous eye sees both the creator God and the artist, Wendy Klemperer, in a work like this, and celebrates both. Happy Sunday!