Monday, February 27, 2012

A Few More Thoughts on Art

I am a highly pragmatic person and at the same time I’m also very creative/artistic. Whenever I take the Myers Briggs Personality Indicator I score back and forth in one area, the Sensing and Intuitive area. I don’t think I’ve ever scored dead in the center – what is referred to as an X. My preference actually flip-flops on either side of this scale. The sensing person is stimulated by the tangible and the intuitive by imagination or possibilities. In fact, this is the area of the Myers Briggs test I have struggled the most to understand, because I don’t see these two preferences as opposite ends of the same scale.

My creative side crescendos when I can make a creative idea come together. But I rarely do anything creative that doesn’t have some practical purpose. I suppose the truly utilitarian person doesn’t find décor practical. But even in my recent venture into sewing I have tried to make useful items.

Some would say that we’d be nowhere without art. But I have struggled within at times to reconcile helping a starving, parentless world of need with creating beauty. Regardless of my mental struggle I am still driven to create. And that creative side usually produces practical beauty. If I’m good for nothing else to the needy, it’s to teach them some way of using their hands and imagination to make something practical.

1 comment:

Josh Harper said...

I am right there with you on the N/S divide. I echo pretty much all of your thoughts... I love to make pretty things using cloth and fibres, but I particularly want them to be actually useful in some way, not just stored in a drawer. And I agree that being hung on a wall to beautify a space is actually useful. (From an I S/N F/T J)