Artists: Emotional or imaginative!?! - Page 3

Sorry to drag this out from under but no discussion on art is complete without an emphatic mention of Rabindranath Tagore.

Inside his vast body of creative outpouring, you will find every conceivable emotion that a person can, has or will ever feel.

It's not that he was more sensitive, or more anguished than anyone else. He could write all that because he was a keen observer and had awsome command over language.

Same goes for Vincent van Gogh. Observation and expression is what marks him out from the innumerable rest.

So friends, my money is on observation and the power to express, not on any imagined or feigned heightened sense of sensitivity among our artist brethren.

Observation without understanding fails to hit the nerve no matter how good a writer you are. Understanding cannot be described, it can only be sensed/felt. A hundred times people have said about good creative writers that they observe and write from the heart. Why is that the case? It is because their senses are acute along with good observation.

Why would you observe something in the first place? Something totally mundane like a blot on the wall? What draws you to write something about that? It is your senses which draw you and then you only write when something stirs you emotionally.

Observation with good writing = academic papers/journals not artistic expression.

Something on Tagore:
[quote= Wikipedia.org]Tagore typically associated his earliest stories (such as those of the "Sadhana" period) with an exuberance of vitality and spontaneity; these characteristics were intimately connected with Tagore's life in the common villages of, among others, Patisar, Shajadpur, and Shilaida while managing the Tagore family's vast landholdings.[35] There, he beheld the lives of India's poor and common people; Tagore thereby took to examining their lives with a penetrative depth and feeling that was singular in Indian literature up to that point.[37] In particular, such stories as "Cabuliwallah" ("The Fruitseller from Kabul", published November 1892), "Kshudita Pashan" ("The Hungry Stones") (August 1895), and "Atithi" ("The Runaway", August 1895) typified this analytic focus on the downtrodden.[38] In "The Fruitseller from Kabul", Tagore speaks in first person as townsman and novelist who chances upon the Afghani seller. Tagore therein attempts to capture such longing of one trapped in the dusty and hardscrabble confines of Indian urban life who dreams of an existence in the mountainous and wild land that the seller must have sacrificed: "There were autumn mornings, the time of year when kings of old went forth to conquest; and I, never stirring from my little corner in Calcutta, would let my mind wander over the whole world. At the very name of another country, my heart would go out to it … I would fall to weaving a network of dreams: the mountains, the glens, the forest .... ".[39] Much of the remaining "Galpaguchchha" stories were penned in Tagore's "Sabuj Patra" period (1914–1917, again, named after one of the magazines that Tagore edited and heavily contributed to).[35] [/quote]

Tagore too felt what his character was feeling - at least to a smaller extent. He imagined what the character was imagining. Clearly this shows his emotional attachment.

I do not say that artists do not feel or that they do not have any sensitivity.

See, from observing to expressing, one has to understand the emotion, the nuances. And that too with reasonable amount of intensity.

But don't we all do that? We see a child begging and feel compassion, we see a bereaved parent and feel empathy. The difference between the artist and us hoi poloi is that they are able to convey this emotion to the mind of the reader (or observer for visual art) with such force and power that the observer (or reader) begins to feel overwhelmed from the stirring of the same emotions in him.

Look at Michelangelo's Pieta, Bernini's St. Theresa, Vincent's Harvest, Rembradt's Night Watch, da Vinci's Mona Lisa; read Rabindranath's Kabuliwallah, Conan Doyle's Valley of Fear, Dicken's David Copperfield. From the intensity of their expressions, be it ink, brush or chisel, feel the emotion welling up inside you.

Therein lies the difference between us all and the artist.

Originally posted by: Ms. Bholi Bhali

I don't know if this topic is a debatable topic, but it was going through my mind for a long time, so I wanted to say it.

 

"Artists are very emotional"

I have heard this phrase/dialogue/line/whatever so many times, that I wonder sometimes that if it is even true or has it just become a simple phrase?

The reason, I think it has little meaning. How an artist can be sadder than a person who lost all his business in fraud or happier than a person who's both wife and child survived, or than a father who found his son alive after four day search under the school building's rubble.

It is true that artist (including, actors, painters, poets, writers, etc) that they have emotions, but when they come on TV and say that artists are close to nature,  near to God, they can express their sadness and happiness in a better way. They can portray common man's feelings better then the common man.

I object!! How can they do that? Why do they say that the abstract art they make shows the conflicts of a human being or of the world? How can a poet tell a story of a beggar in his poems, when he himself is sitting in his air conditioned room?

Jaab tak experience na kiya ho, you can never understand the true feelings.

What Artists make, write, act, portray is their imagination, it is not emotions. Emotions are based on reality, and imagination is fiction.

I haven't read through the whole topic, so I apologize in advance if I'm repeating things.

In my opinion, true artists are emotional and imaginative at the same time. These two fields are quite overlapping. Emotion drives imagination. true artists are people who have been through tragedies, who've experienced pain first hand, and they portray that through their art.

You know you are right concerning experience; experience is needed for anybody to relate a story to someone else or to even relate to somebody. But I think the thing with the actors is that they train themselves to be able to step into anybody's shoes and try to evoke the emotions that person may be feeling. But see when they do that, they don't mean to be able to be more emotional or better at showing their emotions than the "common man"; they are simply trying to make us (the viewers) understand their character and their dilemma. For example, a real life rape victim knows very well what is going on in her life and what she is going through. No actor/actress can know those same exact feelings unless they have experiences it as well. But as actors/actresses, they try to relate that story to viewers so that you know maybe justice may be served, her story can be understood...etc. Actors/actresses are normal human beings who are given the task of opening up our eyes to different angles of a story.

interesting topic, there! 😊

well, methinks tat artists are more IMAGINATIVE than EMOTIONAL!

obviously, they have a certain kina "artstic sensiblity" which helps them to relate/ connect with certain things in a better way than ordinary ppl...

but what truly sets apart these artists....wud b their imagination power! u said tht "unless and until uve experienced a particular emotion, how can u express it"....well, that's exactly what the "arty type" people are best at! Imagination and creativity are like....the two essentials 4 a good artist....

so, i think the word "imaginative" goes best wid artists....

Originally posted by: dare_dis_devil

so, i think the word "imaginative" goes best wid artists....

An excellent point