This Year, Tend to a Unique Creative Vision
What is a personal vision? It's the way you see the world, the power of your own individual perception, the mix that is uniquely you. In Eastern languages, such as Japanese, adjectives always have "for-me-ness" built into the linguistic expression. (For me) this flower is beautiful.
In English, this personal view is supposed to be implicit, but we often forget to acknowledge our subjectivity in every perception.
Our bodies and minds are processors, synthesizers. We take in all kinds of stimuli the way plants take in sunlight; we convert those stimuli into thoughts, expressions and actions, revealing our own natures in particular and human nature in general.
Think of a large studio drawing class with a model, easels set up all around the room. Each artist is positioned at a different angle to the model and each will bring to the subject interpretive, stylistic and technical qualities. One artist may fill the canvas with large, broad minimal lines to capture the figure. Another may work with great precision to get the proportions as realistic as possible. Yet another may use pointillistic daubs to create a dot-matrix impression of the model.
Similarly, at a cocktail party (which many people may be attending as I write this) each person in the room has a different approach to and perception of the party, a different physical and interpretive angle on it.
We are all positioned exclusively as ourselves, with our own particular perceptions. The artist is the unusual person who revels in this uniqueness and finds strength in it and the will to render it authentically.
Artists convey impressions, images, ideas and views to others, many of whom they will never, otherwise, meet. But how many artists deeply question what's being conveyed by their works? Are you aware of and pleased by what you are conveying, whether or not you are an artist? Are you aware of what you stand for? Do you want to establish a more mature understanding of what it is you convey and what it means to your life and the lives you touch?
You arrive at this type of maturity through inquiry, and through experimentation, and ultimately, through developing a sense of accountability in relation to your work and life.
A person with a strong personal vision has realized his fingerprint, the signature of his being, and thus, wherever he goes, presents a recognizable vision and voice, a style. A friend of the painter Miro once said: "When I pick up a stone it's a stone, when Miro picks up a stone, it's a Miro." There are people in every walk of life who make the world their own, and whose works and expressions we would know anywhere. These are our visionaries.
It will be a happy new year for you and yours, I believe, if you tend to the vision that is yours and yours alone.
