The artist at work ~ Literary Hunt

The artist at work

Since art is such a diverse practice, it is difficult for us to say in a few words: "This is how and why artists work." However, we can at least make the following statements in general terms:

(1) Behind all art lies the experience and imagination of the artist;

(2) artists work by a combination of planning and improvisation. Let us look at these in more detail.

Knowledge and imagination: Seemingly all artists rely heavily on their experience. They recapture something they have experienced in words or pictures (and sometimes even in music). The sensation may be severe in some situations, but short-lived. The English author Wordsworth*, for example, was intensely optimistic by temperament and had vivid poetry to describe unusual encounters. In other cases, it may be years of experience. Émile Zola*'s lifelong obsession with the plight of the poor in France in the mid 19th century can be felt in nearly every paragraph of his novel Germinal. He painted a grimly realistic picture of poverty, arguing that it was the cause (not, as many people then believed, the result) of laziness, drunkenness, and vice. Therefore, Zola's work, like that of other great artists, reveals not only a strength of feeling but also of thought.

Nevertheless, intense thinking and emotion do not necessarily lead to practical art. Many artists have chosen strange and fantastic settings. Even so, we find that their work may be filled with comments about the world in which they live. For example, the Austrian writer Franz Kafka*'s story "In the Penal Settlement" largely describes a "punishment machine" in an unnamed, unlocated jail camp. It must have seemed the purest fantasy when the story was published in 1919. Today, two decades after the Nazi concentration camps were liberated, it is almost like a factual report.

The artist sometimes has no direct memory of the experience which prompts his work. A short story by English writer Joyce Cary (1888-1957) is about a girl with a wrinkled face. Cary himself was bewildered by the fact that without wrinkles he couldn't imagine the girl's face. Long after he had finished the story, he suddenly remembered that he had seen a girl like that. Thus, the idea or event that prompts a work of art may be totally irrelevant to the final result.

To sum up: If his life is recalled consciously or unconsciously, and whether he selects a realistic or spectacular environment for his work, the artist is almost forced to focus and comment on his personal experience, as well as on the kind of society in which he works and how people think, behave, feel, and so forth.

Planning and improvisation: The Belgian composer César Franck (1822-90), of the 19th century, frequently started by listing the musical keys by which he wanted to advance his work. It was only later that he added the actual melody. Likewise, the Irish poet, W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) often started writing his ideas down in prose. On the other hand, Franz Schubert* wrote six of his Winterreise songs in one morning, and the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) worked extremely quickly to write masses of verses, and then carefully selected them from this outpouring.

The first pair shows an extraordinary degree of preparation in these four examples; the second, an uncommon level of creative activity, and intensity often referred to as "inspiration." Artists who work only when "inspired" have often assumed that they are possessed by some kind of supernatural force that operates through them. Such a conviction can be beneficial if it gives the artist the strength to work through concerns and hardships. But it's bad if it stops the artist from criticizing his own work.

Our own century saw the birth of modern forms of art, such as the motion picture. Making a film depends on a high level of cooperation between artists and technicians-cooperation that would be impossible without an enormous amount of planning in advance. On further blogs*, we will demonstrate how such plans are made.

The artist at work

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