Creative process: four notable artists
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky, born in Russia, was a musician, pianist, composer, and conductor, perceived by numerous experts and followers to be one of the leading and most significant composers of 20th-century music. Stravinsky’s compositional genre was noteworthy for its stylistic variety. He accomplished international distinction with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Russian Ballets): L’Oiseau de feu (“The Firebird”) (1910), Petrushka (1911/1947), and Le Sacre du Printemps (“The Rite of Spring”) (1913). (Wenborn, 1999)
The genesis of a musical composition is subject to the dichotomy between inspiration combined with innovation and elaboration in consort with the skillful organization. Igor’s creative process was often a combination of the two. His works highlighted craftsmanship, but at the same time, he held spontaneous innovation in high esteem. Contrasting the different available versions of Stravinsky’s compositions reveal that isolated bars were cut without substitution, and in addition, the arrangement in which formal segments came into subsistence is frequently very dissimilar to the consequent versions. However, Stravinsky upheld a relatively conventional notion of work of art across his career. The concept of ‘work in progress (which actually has a Romantic origin) or the post-modern perception of openwork can only be associated with the artist’s creative process. The poetic detail in the conceptual phase of the composition provides a deep insight into the artist’s creative process. (Wenborn, 1999)
Leon Battista Alberti
Alberti was a renowned Italian author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, and cryptographer, and general Renaissance humanist polymath. In art, he is famous for his treatise De picture, which included the first scientific research of perspective. In addition, he penned down works on sculpture. In the field of music, he was supposed to be one of the earliest organists of that period. In architecture, he is commonly viewed as one of the most dedicated to refurbish the recognized language of classical architecture. His legendary significant work on architecture had been translated into several European languages by the 18th century. Alberti was also a skillful cryptographer and conceived both poly-alphabetic ciphers and machine-assisted encryption by means of his cipher disk. (Borsi, 1977)
Alberti looked upon mathematics as the foundation stone for all forms of art and the sciences. The artist was familiar with the sciences of his time. He believed that the final aspiration of an artist is to emulate nature. He professed that different artists make every effort by means of applying different skills to achieve the same goal. Artists desire that the work they have embarked on should seem to be as beautiful as the existent things in nature. Alberti’s creative process thrived upon achieving harmony between Beauty and Reason. As the paramount appearance of this controlled creativity approach, Alberti chose the career of an architect, which he perceived as the premier occupation for humankind, and held architecture more philosophical than philosophy itself in his view. (Borsi, 1977)
Claude Monet
Claude Monet, a distinguished French painter, is also known as Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet. He was the initiator of French impressionist painting and one of the most unswerving and creative practitioners of the movement’s viewpoint of articulating one’s insight before nature, particularly as relevant to Plein-air landscape imagery. The word Impressionism is a consequence of the label of his famous painting Impression, Sunrise. (Tucker, 1995)
The painter epitomized Impressionism more absolutely and added an additional thrust to it to move it further more than any other artist. The style’s extremism was rooted in the resolve to paint not mere reality but the bearing in mind of reality, the act of awareness and perception of nature itself, by presenting how light, particularly bright light, is likely to liquefy the colors and appearance of the scene. The explanation of this effect was anchored in unprompted, broken, prancing brushwork — if possible articulated in paint applied in front of the focused item, en Plein air. The imagery formed is so recognizable at the moment that it’s possible to fail to remember that Impressionism brought in a newly multifaceted consciousness for its original spectators. The occurrence of light was superior, and along with that, the physical boldness of the painted exterior was also enhanced. Paint and actuality existed together in finely tuned tension. His illustrious garden at Giverny is presented to be equally a private utopia as well as a very fundamental part of his creative processes. While he time and again refused the utilization of drawing as an essential part of his creative process, which was a stance well documented in talks and discussions with his critics, documents that tend to challenge this view have come out in the recent past. The part that Monet’s graphic work plays as a primary facet of his creative process has intricately been studied and continues to be extensively scrutinized. (Tucker, 1995)
Johann Sebastian Bach
Bach was a German music composer and organist whose holy and secular endeavors for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments brought together the strings of the Baroque period and pushed it to its definitive development. Although he did not bring in any new forms of music, he augmented the existing German approach with a vigorous contrapuntal method, a matchless command over the harmonic and motivic organization in pieces of music for varied instrumentation, and the inclusion of reworked rhythms and textures from foreign cultures, predominantly from Italy and France. Respected for their intellectual profundity, technical control, and artistic splendor, Bach’s works consist of the Brandenburg concertos, the Goldberg Variations, the Partitas, the Well-Tempered Clavier, and many other renowned ones. (Schweitzer, 1987)
Bach’s musical compositions arose from his remarkable smoothness in contrapuntal creation and motive command, his panache for creativeness on the piano, his revelation to South German, North German, Italian, and French musical cultures, and his evident attachment to the Lutheran liturgy. His association with musicians, instruments, and music itself in his early years, conflated with his promising talent for scripting cohesively composed music of authoritative vibrancy, seem to have set him on the path to building up a diverse, lively musical form in which distant influences were introduced into a deepened adaptation of the pre-accessible German musical language. He used Italians’ theatrical openings, lucid melodic curves, the sharp drawings of their bass lines, superior metric and rhythmic brevity, more integrated motive handling, and more visibly expressed approaches towards modulation. Bach’s evidently devoted, personal liaison with the Christian God in the Lutheran institution and the elevated requirement for devout music during his era, without a doubt highly positioned sacred in his repertoire. Bach’s in-depth acquaintance with and awareness in the liturgy resulted in his building up elaborate relationships among music and linguistic transcript. In addition, Parody was a fundamental constituent of Bach’s creative process, and the Lutheran Masses are excellent illustrations of that process. (Schweitzer, 1987)
Generalizations on creativity and genius
The creative process is a psychological and societal process relating to the creation of new innovative ideas or conceptions or new relations of the creative mind among accessible notions, thoughts, or perceptions. The creative process is driven by the development of either conscious or unconscious awareness. A different idea of creativity is that it is purely the process of creating or generating something new and original. (Weisberg, 1993)
In the process of describing the creative process of the artists in the above section, it is evident how closely the word ‘Genius’ is intertwined with their creativity. Intellectual brilliance, in combination with the highest quality of creativity, brings in the concept of genius. Beautiful ideas and their proper implementations, which have a profound influence on the observers, get tagged with the label of creative genius. Individuals are often said to be creative on the basis of their lifestyle, their works in respective fields, and their attitudes. Their creative process can be perceived as imaginative, supple, not stereotyped, influential, and authoritarian.
Analysis of the creative process
Creativity is my own experience, is more of an assumptions-breaking process. I tend to analyze a given fact, circumstances, or situation in various possible ways. I believe in the fact that there are many roads leading up to a pre-designated target. Each undertaking has an ultimate goal. There may be many approaches one may adopt to accomplish that objective. In order to do so, one has to make several assumptions and work on them. After carefully analyzing each option and drawing conclusions from each one of them explicitly, one needs to start discarding the ones which are non-applicable or non-implicative per se. This process eventually lets you reach the most original and creative path and sets you up on the course of creativity. (Oriah, 2005)
My experience with the creative process is incomplete conformity and aligned with the generalizations I have made in the previous section. As aforementioned, creativity may be perceived as new associations of the mind with preexisting notions or concepts; my approach towards creativity also brings in the sense of originality and innovation.
Creative act outcome
Creativity may intuitively appear to be simple, but in actuality, it is a complex phenomenon. Creativity is definitely an elaborate process, with the product being an outcome of the implementation of creativity. Though author Daniel Joseph Boorstin mentioned in his book ‘The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination‘ that “even the greatest Greek sculptures, potters, painters, and architects were not individualists” (Boorstin, 1992, 94), it can be stated that art and creativity are fundamentally governed by the flow of emotion.
It commences in a wide spectrum of physical words and lies in its preparatory stage. When struck with a novel idea or concept, the first thing which sets in is a vision of how beautiful it will be when it actually comes into existence. The mind thinks about the way the idea may work. Along with vision comes anticipation, which makes the mind believe that the idea will work out to actually be something striking. The following action requires the conceiver of the idea to take the plunge and implement the idea. This is the most decisive part of the entire process. There are many creative ideas that do not have an outcome and remain unfinished because of being curbed at this stage. There may be many emotions, such as excitement and suspicion, involved at this stage. As the process advances, the clarity of the idea is enhanced, and implementation proceeds. Subsequently, after a long tussle in the creator’s mind, a product finally emerges and is validated by the real world. (Weisberg, 1993)
References
Boorstin, D.J. (1992). The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. New York: Random House.
Borsi, F. (1977). Leon Battista Alberti. Oxford: Harper & Row.
Oriah, M.D. (2005). What We Ache For: Creativity and the Unfolding of Your Soul. New York: HarperCollins.
Schweitzer, A. (1987). J. S. Bach. London: Branden Books.
Tucker, P.H. (1995). Claude Monet: Life and Art. London: Yale University Press.
Weisberg, R.W. (1993). Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius. LA: Freeman & Company.
Wenborn, N. (1999). Stravinsky. London: Omnibus Press.