G. Steve Journal

It's The Old Lesson

To celebrate his 90th birthday, the NY TIMES re-published a 2017 interview of lyricist Stephen Sondheim by playwright Lin Manuel Miranda, which included this bit of creative advice:

Sondheim: ...you know, it’s the old lesson, you’ve got to work on something dangerous. You have to work on something that makes you uncertain. Something that makes you doubt yourself.

Miranda: Talk a bit about that danger and uncertainty.

Sondheim: Well, because it stimulates you to do things you haven’t done before. The whole thing is if you know where you’re going, you’ve gone, as the poet says. And that’s death.

Reminded Of Our Oneness

Art critic for THE NEW YORKER Peter Schjeldahl writes about how we might apprehend the Old Masters paintings when the pandemic is over and we're once again able to visit museums:

Here’s a prediction of our experience when we are again free to wander museums: Everything in them will be other than what we remember. The objects won’t have altered, but we will have, in some ratio of good and ill. The casualties of the coronavirus will accompany us spectrally. Until, inevitably, we begin to forget, for a while we will have been reminded of our oneness throughout the world and across time with all the living and the dead. The works await us as expressions of individuals and of entire cultures that have been—and vividly remain—light-years ahead of what passes for our understanding. Things that are better than other things, they may even induce us to consider, however briefly, becoming a bit better, too.

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See What Happens

Time and again we learn of artists who, in attempting to explain the creative process, can only suggest that it's mysterious ... ineffable. The conventional wisdom is that, although inspiration can't be willed into existence, it does require the artist to consciously make a space for it to reveal itself.

Here's musician Robbie Robertson from the opening scene of the movie about The Band, "Once Were Brothers":

I don’t have much of a process of, like, thinking about this and now I’m going to write a song and it’s going to be about that…. A lot of times, the creative process is trying to catch yourself off-guard , and you sit down and you’ve got a blank canvas and you don’t know what you're going to do, and you just see what happens.

 

Highest of Arts

We're currently in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic – the Coronavirus outbreak – and one's thoughts understandably skew darker during these uncertain times. 

Though it may be challenging to achieve, Henry David Thoreau wisely counseled cultivating an optimistic outlook:

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look ... To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.