An artist is a nourisher: a mother, a daughter, a father, son, or friend. Artists live side by side, among countless other artists – other creators. Every creator knows that nestled in the moments of creation there is collaboration; they make their music to the rhythm of relationship.
The artist may lock himself away inside of a squalid studio apartment, alone, laying stroke after stroke upon canvas, painting his very voice into the landscape’s horizon. The grandfather who first showed him Monet’s Water Lilies, who dared to place a paintbrush in his unrefined hands – he is there painting alongside him.
The artist may ponder and pound, slave over a sound that perfectly captures the things hidden in her boarded-up heart. Someone, centuries before her, created a system to organize the chords that she strums upon her guitar. Her words, too, were breathed first by another cherisher of speech, who felt that the only possible way to communicate his or her idea was to create an entirely new word. Her melodies are her own, but a thousand other voices sing the chorus with her.
As a woman arranges the bunch of flowers in a vase on the table, positioning them to please her eyes and add a sprig of the spring from outside to the damp basement, God Himself created their colors and perfume.
Even as God spoke the earth into existence, as He reached down, caressed the formless dust, and breathed breath into the nostrils of man, He created in His triune nature. “Let us make man in our image,” He said in the second chapter of Genesis. He created alone, yet He still created in community.
One may create alone, yet it remains impossible to ever, truly create alone. Creation flows out of a nourished soul, aching with the necessity to express the beauty, pain, brilliance, found in each humble moment of life. Each of those moments that culminate in the crescendo of creative expression is shared with at least one other soul; we create with every man that we will ever know, whether we know them intimately, casually, or even from simply passing by them on the street. Creation is a tangible attempt to love, to live, to breathe. We do not create alone.
Kendra S. Housel is a junior English Education major in the John Wesley Honors College. She has served for the last three years as a member of the Chorale, and is one of the newest members of His Instrument, one of the university’s traveling worship teams. This is also her second year as a blogger for the Alumni Center. Her favorite things include metaphors, car rides, loose leaf tea, and the Basilica di San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy.