Mannequin Monday – You Need an Idea
Another Mannequin Monday. This week we look at shaping ideas into tactile form. Sculptor Steven Whyte works from his studio in Carmel, California. Molding clay into sculpture. Dancer Twyla Tharp speaks of her creative process. Shaping movement into dance. “Scratching” to find ideas to kickstart the creative process. And
I include a bit of my own writing, a story I am currently “scratching” at, looking for the truth in my characters.
This Week’s Reading and Discussion
Today we’ll “read” the sculpted form. Sculptor Steven Whyte maintains a studio in Carmel, California. One of his recent works is Comfort Women: a memorial erected at the St. Mary’s Square in downtown San Francisco “to remember hundreds of thousands of Asian women…who were forced into sexual slavery by Japanese troops during World War II.”
In Whyte’s Facebook bio, he says of himself: ” I am primarily a sculptor of people. A historian, recording a likeness and creating characters of yesterday’s community and today’s society for tomorrow’s viewer. I manipulate clay to found into bronze for the consideration by an audience, in the home, the street and the gallery. ” Check out Steven Whyte’s Facebook page. You can find images of Whyte’s work there. Every one of his pieces radiates strength, power.
His Facebook page further says: “The production of art is based on the fundamental struggle to liberate and express a captive vision of creativity. For Steven Whyte this struggle takes on an added element. More than the mere rendering of a visual image, each time Whyte begins to work with his clay he attempts to produce a presence enriched with distinct personality, spirit and vitality.”
I think that last sentence says it nicely: “…a presence enriched with distinct personality, spirit and vitality.” One can easily apply that to writing. Well-written characters create a presence enriched with distinct personality. Plot and setting provide a framework for a story, but it is the characters that in-spire the story with life.
This Week’s Podcast/Interview
I’m in the middle of reading Twyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life. I like Chapter 6, Scratching. Tharp describes scratching as a habitual routine of looking for “something.” Looking for traction to keep going. Searching for ideas to get her creative process started.
She opens the chapter this way. “The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark, random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight. There is nothing yet to research. For me, these moments are not pretty. I look like a desperate woman, tortured by the simple message thumping away in my head: ‘You need an idea.’ It’s not enough for me to walk into a studio and start dancing, hoping that something good will come of my aimless cavorting on the studio floor. Creativity doesn’t generally work that way for me. (The rare times when it has stand out like April blizzards.) You can’t just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are just verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however minuscule, is what turns the verb into a noun – paint into a painting, sculpt into sculpture, write into writing, dance into a dance.”
The concept of scratching characterizes how I often put one of these blog posts together. I’m looking to link a few pieces of fiction, bits of story, notes on artists I know or have recently discovered. And I pick at lots of stories, art, interviews, writings…until connections come together.
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