CREATIVE ENERGY IN ORIGINAL ART

Last week’s column drew more comments than anything I have written in years. There seems no doubt among my readers that a Western North Carolina author will win the Nobel Prize in Literature or that Santa Fe will eventually be known as “the Asheville of the West” (although my forecast that visitors to New Mexico will have to bring their own water drew a wry comment that there would be an option of buying water from Coca-Cola). The bulk of the discussion focused on two of my many predictions:

1. The importance of viewing “original art” will diminish as copying technology is refined. Three-dimensional digital scanning will allow texture and brush strokes to be recorded in their entirety. A marking technology will be developed so that these “depth” features can be reproduced in prints.

2. The “genuine originals” of art will be placed in vaults, and will be of value only to scholars and the same collectors who value the handwritten manuscript of a novel.

Robin Rector Krupp pointed out the difficulty of reproducing folk art, where the original may be on tarpaper, corrugated cardboard or reclaimed shingles.

I got an email from Daniel Smith, who paints “hyper realistic original oils” and is represented at Red Step Artworks on 3rd Avenue just off historic Main Street in Hendersonville. He queried: “I wonder now how they will be able to "Capture/Scan" the energy that went into the painting. Although the 3-d repros will look, physically, like the original, some viewers, not knowing they are looking at a repro, will ‘feel’ that something is missing.”

This got me thinking about the noun “energy.” Artists use that word to denote “psychic energy” or “creative energy,” a concept that is alien to the scientist but meaningful to other artists. Perhaps creative energy taps into Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious” or perhaps it taps into the primordial quantum entanglement that caused everything in the universe to be part of one master wave function ever since the Big Bang. Whatever the mysterious entity is, there is little doubt that the act of creation leaves behind more than the marks on paper, board or canvas (or shingle, for that matter). We may as well call it creative energy; it is just as real in 2009 as the neutrino was when Wolfgang Pauli posited a particle with zero mass, zero charge and zero angular momentum in 1930.

Daniel and I had a conversation about creative energy. What is there that cannot be scanned? In his art, there is often a pencil drawing under the paint, and sometimes another painting under the new one. I thought of Willem de Kooning continuing to paint on a canvas that his fellow artists thought was finished, until eight months later every square millimeter of the image that they had admired had been covered over.

More profoundly, there can be a separation between conception and execution. The right brain has an artistic idea. The left brain participates in executing the idea, perhaps using freehand drawing or a grid to get started, and then later brush strokes, palette knife and fingers. Artistic energy was expended in the ideation, but more was added in the execution. We talked on, considering examples where the creative energy of two artists becomes combined. I cited Skip Rohde’s powerful “In Memoriam,” that uses Michelangelo’s “Pieta” as its model for an image of a dead soldier on an American flag on his mother’s lap.

Beyond these considerations is the simple fact that the artist has touched the canvas of the original. What did he leave there that cannot be reproduced? His energy. It is a mystery, but I accept it is real. I thank Daniel Smith for bringing this to my attention.

“Caboose” and “Robot” © Daniel Smith

© 2009 Edward C. McIrvine

Arts Spectrum column #453

October 2, 2009