Sunday, October 06, 2024

On Creativity: So What?

The writing of this blog post was interrupted by Hurricane Helene. Five days without internet disrupted my train of thought, and now I'm trying to get it back again. It's important to me because I have a goal. And that goal is this: I want to be able to take my inspirations and ideas and translate them into woven cloth. Which I suppose is a way to say I want to design my own textiles.

So, what does it take to do that? I started by exploring the why and the how of creativity. And that lead to another question - so what? How does understanding why and how I create help me design a pattern on my own? To be honest, I don't know. But it seemed logical to start by understanding the science and art of my medium well enough be able to translate an idea into an achievable object. In my case, that means coming up with an idea, writing a draft, and weaving a reasonable facsimile of the image in my head. 

The science of this goal is that I must thoroughly understand the particular weave structure I want to use.
The art of this goal is whether or not I can do it. 

So far, my weaving ideas have resulted from springboarding off a particular draft. I find a draft that interests me, start weaving, and then follow ideas from there. While I enjoy this process tremendously, I'm wondering whether I can take an idea and successfully translate it on my own to a finished textile. I don't know the answer to that, but it's something I want to find out.

2 comments:

Toirdhealbheach Beucail said...

Leigh, the only "art" I can apply your question to is writing, of which I have done a fair amount.

For longer works, what I have found is that while I often have an idea or even a plot in mind, it generally does not seem to survive the actual process. In the case of writing, it seems to be because the characters "develop a life of their own" and start wandering off on their own paths; trying to pull them back to the trail is difficult if not pointless at times. But we always seem to get to the end, they and I, even if is not the way I expected.

Leigh said...

TB, I have heard other fiction writers say the same thing, which intrigues me immensely. It seems to point to an undefined element of creativity, something real but elusive.