CREATIVE DETAIL

We need to share details of our creative methods and processes.

A couple of pages ago, I lamented that we don’t share any of the creative details of how we are inspired.  For example, we are taught that LeCorbusier was inspired by the machine age, and specifically ships.  Corb includes photographs of ships in his Towards a New Architecture.  We have brought this up before.

But that’s not enough.  Sure, you can see the industrial ship inspiration in the top register of Villa Savoy.  But that is a very superficial understanding.

Rather, what needs to be shared are the details of how he used ship imagery.  Can a path be found between the detail of a steamship, lines he put on his paintings, and a building?  Did he hang out at the ship yard and draw ships?  If so, then what?  Did he abstract the geometry he found interesting in some way?  Did he look at the plan for the bridge of a steamship and then make vertical projections?  Did he take photographs?  If so, then what?  Did he make outlines of the images, and then use that as the basis for a painting?

I don’t think that I am the only one asking this question.  Adam Gopnick, writing on page 46 of the April 25, 2016 issue of the New Yorker about Paul McCartney, asks:

“And yet, even though we’re drowning in Beatle fact, something mysterious remains, and that mysterious thing, as always in the lives of artists, is how they did what they did.”

How they did what they did should not and need not be a mystery.  And I really can’t believe that it remains this cultural mystery.  Or let me put it this way, given the rapid opening of our culture and society, it should not remain a mystery.