This postTwo thoughts on art from Madeleine L’Engle in her book Walking on Water:
All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older. But they start off without self-consciousness as they paint their purple flowers, their anatomically impossible people, their thunderous, sulphurous skies. They don’t worry that they may not be as good as Di Chirico or Bracque; they know intuitively that it is folly to make comparisons, and they go ahead and say what they want to say. What looks like a hat to a grownup may, to the child artist, be an elephant inside a boa constrictor.
In art we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten; we are able to walk on water; we speak to the angels who call us; we move, unfettered, among the stars.
Beautiful. And while the rational machine in me says, “That’s just figurative,” the real part of me, the eternal part, whispers that it’s completely true, and in a very non-figurative way. And someday the scales will fall away from our eyes and we’ll see things as they truly are, full of majesty and magic, brimming with a beauty that transcends even our most poignant experiences here on earth. I can’t wait. :)
But since I must wait, I create. I write. I paint. I design. I compose. And for a moment it’s almost like I’m home again.
