The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Visionary Photographer Edward Weston on the Importance of Cross-Disciplinary Curiosity in Creative Work

Visionary Photographer Edward Weston on the Importance of Cross-Disciplinary Curiosity in Creative Work

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos,” Frankenstein author Mary Shelley observed in contemplating how creativity works. All creative people recognize this chaos — the chaos of influences, inspirations, memories, and stimulations, cross-pollinating in the mind to germinate the seed of something we dare call original: our very own contribution to the world, tessellated of these myriad existing worlds we carry within us. Rilke knew this when we composed his exquisite meditation on inspiration and the combinatorial nature of creativity: “For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning… One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others… One must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window…” Whitman, too, knew it when he composed his tenets of creation: “All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world.”

The influential photographer Edward Weston (March 24, 1886–January 1, 1958) articulates this elemental yet often unregarded, even deliberately evaded, truth of the creative life with uncommon splendor of sentiment in the out-of-print 1966 treasure The Daybooks of Edward Weston: Volume II, California (public library).

Edward Weston by Tina Modotti, 1924. (Museum of Modern Art)

In a diary entry from October 29, 1930 — the year he discovered his singular creative voice and began taking his now-iconic closeups of fruits and vegetables — Weston writes:

In this age of communication, through books, reproductions, exhibits brought from all over the world, who can be free from influence, — preconception? But — it all depends upon what one does with this cross-fertilization: — is it digested, or does it bring indigestion?

Reflecting on his own creative process at Point Lobos — the breathtaking natural reserve on the Big Sur coast of California, near where he lived for many years and where he took some of his most famous photographs — Weston echoes Montaigne’s disdain for the illusion of originality and Auden’s insistence on the crucial difference between authenticity and originality, and adds:

When I start out in the field, for instance at “The Point,” it seems to me no one could be more free from intention, preconception than I am: allowing whatever crosses my path to incite me to work — and working I do not think: of course there is one’s subconscious memory to draw upon, — all the events, all the eyes have seen in this life and how many more lives? to influence one. But no one starts alone, apart, — we only add to that which has gone before, we are only parts of the whole.

Even so, Weston observes, this morass of influences and existing ideas is sieved through one’s individual artistic sensibility to deliver the golden grains of genius by which a great artist leaves a mark upon the monolith of culture:

The “individual” adds more or combines more than the mass does, he stands out more clearly, a prophet, with a background, a future, and the strength, clarity to speak, — in his chosen way, — music — paint — words; a Bach or a Blake.

Edward Weston: Pepper No. 30 (1930)

More than a year later, Weston revisits the subject of inspiration in another diary entry, insisting that such combinatorial creativity is all the stronger if the influences come from fields other than one’s own — which, of course, is the founding ethos of Brain Pickings. He writes:

I feel that I have been more deeply-moved by music, literature, sculpture, panting than I have by photography, — that is by the other workers in my own medium. This needs explanation. I am not moved to emulate, — neither to compete with or imitate, these other creative expressions, but seeing, hearing, reading something fine excites me to greater effort, — (“inspires” is just the word, but how it has been abused!). Reading about Stieglitz, for instance, means more to me than seeing his work. Kandinsky, Brancusi, Van Gogh, El Greco, have given me fresh impetus: and of late Keyserling, Spengler, Melville, (catholic taste!) in literature. I never hear Bach without deep enrichment, — I almost feel he has been my greatest “influence.” It is as though, in taking to me these great conceptions of other workers, the fallow soil in my depths, emotionally stirred, receptive, has been fertilized.

Every page of The Daybooks of Edward Weston unspools a different flavor of insight into life and art, offered with tremendous self-awareness, humility, and generosity of spirit. Complement this particular fragment with Beethoven on idea-incubation and Oliver Sacks on the three essential elements of creativity, then revisit Virginia Woolf’s transcendent epiphany about what it means to be an artist.


Published May 2, 2019

https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/05/02/edward-weston-daybooks-creativity/

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