Excerpt from The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

[ovrthinxit]

The compelling thing about making art - or making anything, I suppose - is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances. Circe, Nimbue, Artemis, Athena, all the old sorceresses: they must have known the feeling as they transformed mere men into fabulous creatures, stole the

Comments

[aquaenumen]

Interestingly enough, that isn't the compelling thing for me about art at all... usually the solid substantial thing is so far from what I originally intended that it is completely different; I never realize anything exactly the way I had pictured it.

But there is a moment that's not like materialization but rather like... um, light? It sounds really corner and bizarre, but I hold onto that feeling for as long as I can until I lose it again, and then go back and try to fix it or find it again. It's like playing a freaking Hot-or-Cold game, or trying to find the source of a fragrance in the dark.

In some ways I think of (real) artists as like... athletes. Where you can have some intuitive gift sometimes, but most of it is work and training every day. And even though I want to be good now, that's just not something that's going to materialize automatically. It's a skill that you have to train.

But yeah I disagree with the whole materialization thing... then again, I like things being half-insubstantial.