Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we're talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we are experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It's not only how we express what we remember , it's how we interpret it - for ourselves and others.
Interpretation
Creativity involves connecting past experiences and emotions through metaphor to create art.
In this quote, Twyla Tharp emphasizes the role of metaphor as a fundamental element in creativity and art. She suggests that creativity is not just about original ideas but rather about how we link our existing memories, feelings, and experiences to create something new. Metaphor acts as a bridge between our past and present, enhancing our understanding and expression of these connections in artistic forms.
In practice
During a workshop on artistic expression, I shared this quote to inspire participants about the importance of metaphor in creativity.
Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.
I am still pushing the edge of what my body can do.
No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft.
Through performance, I found the possibility of establishing a dialogue with the audience through an exchange of energy, which tended to transform the energy itself. I could not produce a single work without the presence of the audience, because the audience gave me the energy to be able, through a specific action, to assimilate it and return it, to create a genuine field of energy.
A painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art.
When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.
I see my finished platinum print (in the viewfinder) in all its desired qualities, before my exposure.
I've been writing poems since I was in the Navy - to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts And eloquence.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.