Visualize Reality

I just went to bed. I was reading, as I do every night, a novel. I read novels to unwind, to remove my mind from the day and ease it in to the night. I read fiction, made-up worlds that are much less complicated than my every day existence.

I've thought a lot in the last year or two about creativity, and how it has a pattern and a cycle. When you follow the cycle, and allow it to happen, there are amazing things that can happen. It has been many years since I've allowed myself creative freedom. I still dabbled in being creative, but this evening I find that I'm in a creative cycle that is as close to the creative freedom I had in my childhood as I have ever been as an adult. More on the creative cycle later... but even as a creative, imaginative child I envied people their ability to view the world in a way that allowed them to CREATE from scratch things that I couldn't see... I've always been more of a mimic. I never saw the sculpture in the block of marble. I never saw the painting that belonged on the canvas, I just found myself drawn to it. Michalangelo said "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set it free" a statement I suppose I've always envied, since I'd never grasped seeing things that weren't already there.

Which brings me back to my creative cycle, my new passion, and my first real grasp of the meaning of Michalangelo's words. Tonight I read a line in a simple novel... and I finally GET IT. A character in the novel is an architect, and when another character asks to see his concept drawings, she says "You must be an expert at visualizing reality from a flat drawing". When in school for Interior Design, I envied my fellow students who could see a room in their minds and draw it onto paper, or reverse that and see the flat drawings of a space and visualize it in 3d. That is a rare and unique thing. I had all the technical skill, but very little of the heart and imagination of a 'true designer'. (Candice Olsen of Divine Design comes to mind - her sketches on the show, which are done before the room is built match the finished product down to the smallest detail).

The architect in the story replies "You've got it backwards. I make drawings from a reality I visualize". In the past, I would have again been envious of this (fictional!) person's ability to create in that way, but this time, those words are EXACTLY how I feel about my passion and talent with photography.

I make pictures from a reality I visualize. I am able to capture things about people in ways they don't see themselves, and I finally feel like a true ARTIST.