Writings about Art, Independence and Spirit

I was perusing my book shelf recently and pulled out a book entitled “If You Want To Write” by Brenda Ueland, I always love reading this book, it was written in 1938, but it is timeless in it’s message. I remember giving this book to my father after I had first read it, back in the 80’s, he also loved it, it was a good feeling to know it had touched him the way it had me, I was grateful to have been able to share it with him.
In it she writes not just about writing, but about all creative endeavors and how our imagination and creativity is our god given right, each of us possessing unique talents and originality.
Here’s an excerpt:

Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his true self and not from the self he thinks it should be. Jennings at John Hopkins, who knows more about heredity and the genes and chromosomes than any man in the world says that no individual is exactly like any other individual, that no two identical persons ever existed. Consequently, if you speak or write from yourself you cannot help being original.
So remember these two things: you are talented and you are original. Be sure of that. I say this because self-trust is one of the most important things in any creative expression.
This creative power and imagination is in everyone and so is the need to express it, i.e., to share it with others. But what happens to it?
It is very tender and sensitive, and it is usually drummed out of people early in life by criticism (so called “helpful criticism” is often the worst kind) by all those unloving people who forget that the letter killeth and the spirit giveth life. Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.
You know how all children have this creative power. You have all seen children working hard at something they love just for the joy of it… they were working for nothing but fun, for that glorious inner excitement. It was the creative power working within them. It was hard work but there was no pleasure or excitement like it and it was something never forgotten.

But this joyful, imaginative, impassioned energy dies out of us very young. Why? Because we do not see that it is great and important. Because we let dry obligation take its place. Because we don’t respect it in ourselves and keep it alive by using it. And because we don’t keep it alive in others by listening to them.
For when you come to think of it the only way to love a person is by listening to them and seeing and believing in the god, in the poet, in them. For by doing this, you keep the god and the poet alive and make it flourish.

She goes on to tell a story about the painter Van Gogh:

When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. He sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lamp post, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: “It is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And then on cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.
When I read this letter of Van Gogh’s it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of art. Before I had thought that to produce a work of painting or literature
You scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were. And so on and so on.
But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.
The difference between Van Gogh and you and me is, that while we may look at the sky and think it is beautiful, we don’t go so far as to show someone else how it looks. One reason may be that we do not care enough about the sky or other people. But most often I think it is because we have been discouraged into thinking what we feel about the sky is not important.