Why We Should All Be 'Creating'

Creation is an act of resistance. Art communicates illicit or taboo topics, thoughts, and emotions in ways which words cannot. Personal creation — a letter scrawled on the back of a receipt, journal entry, hand-drawn poster, collection of photographs, love letter, quote written in crayon — can be viewed as an act of resistance. Whatever is being expressed, art created for one’s own enjoyment of the process or product is the key to unlocking and accessing greater creativity, empathy, and openness in a society that increasingly values the repression and minimisation of feeling. 

This expression of self — of chimeric, unutterable feelings — culminates in the act of physical creation. To purge parts of ourselves through art is a uniquely human urge, one that is undervalued. For me, this correlates into my pile of journals — I turn to them, ironically, when words fail. Sketches, drawings, and clippings of my life which can find no other home are immortalised — sacred, only for me. This is art, perhaps in its rawest form. 

Traditionally the exploit of highly ‘educated’ and wealthy women, the creation of art has been limited to a select few. This exclusivity has only increased, as the emphasis on capitalistic and ‘productive’ values has become stronger. Tech, AI, and the world of ‘serious’ employment (hobbies being rebranded as ‘side hustles’ and money-making schemes come to mind here) have pushed the innately human need to create further toward the margins of society and thus towards the margins of one’s own consciousness. 

The way we define art feeds into this. ‘Art’ has a myriad of definitions, both personally and also according to the OED. Its primary definition is the “display” of “skill” as the “result of knowledge or practice.” Art is linked explicitly to the repeated action of a practice — it is a process. However, it is also linked to the overt ‘display’ of this process — a process which is only valid when there is an end product to show for it. This is where the finite parameters of creation are grounded. 

World War I poet Edward Thomas was a collector of personal imagery and art; a photograph of his wife along with an unsent letter addressed to her were found on his person after his death in the Battle of Arras in 1917. Through his poems, all written between 1914 and 1917, he wrote about what he saw, and inadvertently, how it made him feel. His state of mind and the precariousness of a body at war is reflected in his writing about the English rural countryside, remembered and immortalised for himself alone, in his own words. These poems, we assume, are only truly intelligible to their writer. Thomas alludes to this intangibility of his audience in his penultimate poem ‘I Never Saw that Land Before’, referencing “what would not even whisper my soul” and his use of a “language not to be betrayed.” The language of poetry, and equally thereof a paintbrush or piano key, allows expression without full legibility. Art, according to Thomas, must first be personal before it can then become interpersonal. 

The etymological origins of the word provide further clarity to why art is important for self-expression. ‘Art’ comes from the root ‘airt’, which means “quarter of the heavens.” It also, a little later into the fourteenth century, took the spelling of ‘ort’ or ‘orte’, which referred figuratively to the “leftover” scraps of knowledge and “wisdom” which one holds (according to the OED). Art still has these meanings — it is an expression of something that is not quite concrete — a shadow of it gracing the eyes of the viewer. These older versions of the word help to explain the simultaneous, though oppositional, universality and singular nature of art; it is an expression of personal history that is often ignored in modern life. 

Creation brings us back to ourselves, to community, to the land beneath our feet — reclaiming this ‘superfluous’ act of expression is vital to the survival of human culture and connection. As Thomas says, creation allows us to address the “whispers” of our own minds in search of others who will “answer when such whispers bid.” 

Image from Wikimedia Commons