The Limits Of Sentiment And The Experience Of Creativity

As an artist I have an understanding of what moves people and how it moves them. Often a physical flourish, a color scheme, a tonal quality in sound can give a viewer a sensation or an emotional response. This can be very powerful and I am sure this is something family to all. It can take one into a different perspective of their experience and in so can be very provocative and enticing. Many people spend their lives creating cultivating these experiences for others, are driven to it even. It is an act of conjuring up form from an internal pool of ideas and images.

What happens when an artist makes decisions is that what has churned up inside is then made into a more or less concrete piece. It exists in time and space. It is something that has been solidified from something flowing. And this artistic statement affects others thoughts, feelings and perception. However this can speak to a way of experiencing that is solidified.

The internal movement felt in viewing artwork can be called sentiment. It can also be thought of as how the piece makes one feel. That which is displayed in the work which gives the response of sentiment in the viewer can be called the mood of a piece. The mood is based on a certain set of referents, elements that make up the composition, that collectively relate to each other. These compositional elements are interpreted and associated in the viewer to create sentiment within them. The physical colors, sounds, actions, images, characters and so forth become ideas upon which the viewer creates a story and emotion.

Although this response is of the moment of viewing and this will fluctuate over time, still it is rather specific to the elements that have been introduced. And as provocative as the experience of art can be it is often only a veneer over the immense possibility and power of association and creativity which exists within us all. It is the cooling form of the churning magma.

Sentiment of course exists in us in everyday life, art only manipulates its existence. Sentiment is a way of interpreting the things we experience, a way of putting them into perspective. It is a way of understanding but also in the same manner a way of insulating us as well. It is the creation of a story with emotion that helps us to act and move, but it is based on a limited set of elements. These specific elements are the elements our minds threw up to us and which we grasped onto for use in interpreting a specific circumstance. But even as a sentiment is settling there are still a continuing amount of elements that are being introduced from within us. The action of association and creativity pours on. Some of these may be disturbing to us, as could even be the unrelenting flow that comes. The orientation offered by one sentiment may be preferable to the disorienting experience of several forming at once. By choosing the understanding of one we protect from the knowledge of many.

It is my assertion here that we all have this great facility for creativity and association on going within us at all times. I can see it in myself and I have no reason to doubt it in others. I also know that the more clearly I can see this font of creativity the more amazing is the experience of it. When I compare this to the moments when I feel sentiment I know how much less the sentiment is. Even when sentiment is very compelling it is far less compelling than this experience. Looking at the sentiment I am distracted from the greater flow from which it was formed. The sentiment, the notion, is the little boat going down stream away from great powerful spewing surge of the font from which it came. Feeling the sentiment, reflecting on the notion, makes me forget what gave it birth and in so feels to me a the little death. All I have written above is an extrapolation of this. It is a personal experience of my being's make up turned into art criticism.

Then to return to art criticism, and even to propose an artistic direction, making art that is overly concerned on creating mood or on the manipulation of sentiment will yield a work that reflects a limit within the viewer. Art that may use sentiment and mood but use it to point to the greater creative actualities within us all will reflect to a greater degree the depth of personal experience already existing within. I think the artistic endeavor can be more than creating a statement to be pondered or felt but a way to enable the viewer reflect on their relationship to the art and in so to reflect on their own experience of themselves and their ever present world.