Inspiration...and return

“The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.” - Patti Smith (from Just Kids, her excellent memoir about life and art in '70s-era New York)

As Smith says, the flight through the incorporeal realm...

...must be followed by the return to the material world...

...where we turn our visions into earthly form with the tools we find at hand.

In order to capture those all-too-fleeting visions during the potent time just after "the return," it's important, I think, that tools at hand be the ones that are truly best shaped for us...for the artists we actually are, as opposed to the artists we may have wanted to be, or felt some kind of outside pressure to be.

For some young artists, it can take a bit of time to discover which tools (which medium, or genre, or career pathway) will truly suit them best. For me, although many different art forms attract me, the tools that I find most natural and comfortable are language and oil paint; I've also learned that as someone with a limited number of spoons it's best to keep my toolbox clean and simple. My husband, by contrast, thrives with a toolbox absolutely crowded to bursting, working with language, voice, musical instruments, puppets, masks animated on a theater stage, computer and video imagery, and half a dozen other things besides, no one of these tools more important than the others, and all somehow working together. For other artists, the tools at hand might be needles and thread; or a jeweller's torch; or a rack of cooking spices; or the time to shape a young child's day....

To me, it's all art, inside the studio and out. At least it is if we approach our lives that way.

Art above: An illustration for Hans Christian Andersen's "The Garden of Paradise" by Edmund Dulac (1882-1953).