{"id":7124,"date":"2016-02-25T13:52:56","date_gmt":"2016-02-25T18:52:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=7124"},"modified":"2019-05-15T13:50:05","modified_gmt":"2019-05-15T17:50:05","slug":"the-urge-to-create","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=7124","title":{"rendered":"The urge to create"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Teach your kids to code,” suggests\u00a0Eutopia, offering resources<\/a>\u00a0for parents to\u00a0help their kids learn coding.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure that learning to code would have made my childhood\u00a0better. Especially if it took time away from my true calling: making miniature villages.<\/p>\n

The girl in the photo\u00a0above, in Laos, probably\u00a0didn’t think she was “working” or “learning.” She just had the urge to create, and she used what she could find.<\/p>\n

She was lucky to have a plastic cup for a mold. When I played next to the creek in our yard, I wasn’t allowed to take any toys or tools from the house. But like this little girl, I built my\u00a0urban developments with sticks, leaves, mud and stones.<\/p>\n

When I ran across this photo today, I wondered: At what age do we get the urge to start creating things? Or is the impulse really something else? <\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe it’s the urge to control. We make our little villages so that we can be masters of the universe, since as children\u00a0all the adults are always\u00a0pushing us around. <\/span><\/p>\n

Or maybe it’s the urge to escape. In my childhood during\u00a0the turbulent ’60s, I remember\u00a0trying to escape chaos and\u00a0things I didn’t understand (why is my sister crying and Mom yelling?<\/em>). I went outdoors to make imaginary worlds that were less confusing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe this creation of childhood comes from trying to reproduce things that dripped through our heads, either in our dreams or in our daydreams. Or simply from the need to play in an open-ended way.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

This is our beginning as artists: We want to express ourselves.<\/p>\n

Self-expression is the key ingredient in my personal definition of art. That self-expression may or may not resonate with every\u00a0viewer; but it must show the hand and mind and spirit of a single human being, the artist.<\/span><\/p>\n

I get so tired of landscape paintings that have nothing expressive in them. They could be painted by anyone at all. <\/span><\/p>\n

It takes no creativity to reproduce a pretty scene; it just takes painting skills. That sort of painting doesn’t offer the world anything that\u00a0it doesn’t already have. <\/span><\/p>\n

Sometimes our self-expression is ugly. Sometimes it is not the kind of thing that people want to put above\u00a0their couch. Especially if the color doesn’t match their couch. <\/span><\/p>\n

Art isn’t about what goes above the\u00a0couch. It’s about the urge to create, the expression that\u00a0prompts one human being to respond to another.<\/span><\/p>\n

You might not like what that other human being has to say. Their feelings and experiences might\u00a0make you uncomfortable, you might\u00a0want to turn away, and you definitely might not\u00a0want it in your living room. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t\u00a0art.<\/span><\/p>\n

Art and beauty are\u00a0two different things. <\/span><\/p>\n

Our\u00a0self-expression often takes the form of something beautiful, but that isn’t what makes it art. It’s the humanity that comes through in the artist’s choice of subject, colors, composition and techniques, that makes a picture which is their very own vision of the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

That little girl in Laos would be a teenager finishing high school now. I wonder if she will\u00a0be an artist, or a coder?<\/p>\n

Today’s penny is a somewhat muddy 2002, for the year I photographed her.<\/p>\n

\"Feb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Teach your kids to code,” suggests\u00a0Eutopia, offering resources\u00a0for parents to\u00a0help their kids learn coding. I’m not sure that learning to code would have made my childhood\u00a0better. Especially if it took time away from my true calling: making miniature villages. The girl in the photo\u00a0above, in Laos, probably\u00a0didn’t think she was “working” or “learning.” She just … read more The urge to create<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7126,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[316],"tags":[439,35,82,455,361,757,438,160,756],"class_list":["post-7124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-improvisation","tag-439","tag-art","tag-beauty","tag-child","tag-creation","tag-humanity","tag-laos","tag-painting","tag-self-expression"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7124"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7147,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7124\/revisions\/7147"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}