Can We Learn Anything Practical From The Creative Work of An Artist

Can we ordinary working stiffs learn anything practical from the creative work of an artist? The question arose as we sorted through the work of artists and craftsmen in our recent posts. What craftsman do was deemed a practical source of ideas we could apply to our own work, whatever it is. But what about what the creative part of what artists do?

Now, we did point out that the artist's work calls forth the same approach and process of the craftsman. An artist needs to learn practical, technical skills to make their creative inspiration "real." And in this, we can learn as much from an artist's work as from a craftsman. But what about this "creative inspiration" thing? Is this something we can learn from and apply to our daily labor?

First, let's note the vagueness of the phrase "creative inspiration." Ideally you get what we're driving at here. Frankly, it's the best description we could come up with for that spark - or whatever you want to call it - that stabs the artist's mind, heart, soul and starts the ball rolling. For some it comes suddenly, for some at certain times of the day or night, for some whenever it comes.

Our impression might be that it just strikes and strikes hard. And it's up to the artist to grab it and hold on tight. Otherwise the inspiration sort of dissipates into thin air - or something like that.

Fact is, as we've noted before, "creativity" is a subject widely written about albeit a bit mysterious.

At first blush, such capricious stabs of inspiration don't seem to lend anything to us regular guys attending to our frequently repetitive, humdrum daily tasks, whether our labor is physical, mental, outdoors, at a computer screen, etc. Our routines tend to be the same day to day - at least for most jobs - and there's not much inspiration that spills into any cracks in the daily flow.

If we're well-organized and relatively efficient, we can almost think of ourselves as a kind of mini-manufacturing business. Picture an assembly line in, for example, a beer factory. Simplified, a switch is flipped, the process begins. It goes on without pause, over and over and over again. The beer flows into cans and bottles at a determined rate. Vats (if that's the correct term) feed the line at one end, the product emerges at the other. 

Indeed, in these days of computerized manufacturing - and this is true of beer - there's hardly a human in sight. All proceeds under the "commands" of a computer program. Any room for inspiration in this? Hardly.

While most of us human workers may not attend to our work each day in an exactly comparable manner, again, if we're well-organized and efficient, there's some similarity. 

We might even call it the usual hum-drum that takes up so much of our work efforts.

Having a small business, hum drum captures the majority of the day's labor. And there's nothing wrong with that, as long as there's no grinding of teeth as each hum drum item pops up on the daily task list. Indeed, hum drum presents the perfect opportunity to offer up such items, given how they take effort that's not going to give us any glory or, perhaps, any real satisfaction.

For example, weekly business reviews (revenue vs. expenses), checking off items on the To Do list, organizing next week's list, attending webinars, most of which will fulfill continuing education requirements, but rarely provide anything new or useful for clients and customers (and so on) rarely rise above the hum drum. 

So aside from the great gift of providing many chances to offer up the grind and thank God for those chances, when and how do we either stumble on or capture a moment of inspiration in all this? 

Well, we start by tempering our daily work flow such that it's not just a kind of daily Tsunami that overwhelms us over us and leaves the shore a mess that needs to be put back into order each day.

(Although some days can be just like that!)

Tempering requires order, peace and moderation. (Hmmm, doesn't the daily prayer to St. Joseph the Worker remind us of this?) 

We use the idea of tempering as it comes from the tempering of, for example, steel. The process of tempering creates hardness, consistency, resiliency, elasticity. Not sure why or where this concept inserted itself into daily intentions applied to my prayer and work (ora et labora), but it has. And it's been quite useful. As we'll see next time, it may be a good way to find moments, or "space" in our busy day to make room for occasional stabs of real creative inspiration to make our work more pleasing to God.

A lot there, as we'll see next time...