Revered American architect Frank Lloyd Wright is known for creating some of the most unique and dynamic structures on the planet. His guiding artistic principle was “Form Follows Function”. He believed that every building grew forth from its intended purpose. His task as a creative artist was to discover the “function” of each building, a marriage of the practical and the imaginative issuing from a source hidden deep within both the art and the artist.
As Spring bursts forth in our world, I am struck with Wright’s principle as it relates to the creative process in all of us. In my own creative work, and in my observation of others, I am aware of how important it is to let go of preconceived notions of form, and, like Wright, allow the shape and medium of the work to come from within.
This applies to form in the broadest sense of the term. If we are attached to the idea that a creative life means garnering fame or approbation from significant “experts”, it can prove a huge distraction from entering into the process of creative work.
If we believe that to be valuable we have to earn a high degree, or sacrifice our free time to earning more money so we can impress others, we become a slave to form. If we believe we must be married in order to live a “respectable” life, or bandy about a wedding band our loved one cannot afford, we are missing the forest for the sake of one showy tree. This leads to a hollow sense of self, and the persistent suspicion that the life we are living is not our own.
These are obvious examples. Often our enslavement to form is more subtle. We believe we are creating from our own fire, only to feel devastated and envious when we encounter someone sporting greater exterior wealth. We experience a moment of deflation, a “I’ll never be like him” moment.
Envy can actually be a valuable tool. It lets us know what we want for ourselves. Instead of envying someone else’s success, we can ask, “Whoa – what is this telling me? I should be asking not, ‘How did she get that novel published?’, but ‘Do I have a novel in me?”
Our commitment to building and re-building the fire of our own inner creative source must be renewed every morning, across the span of days. “That’s a lot of work,” you may say. Indeed, but the rewards echo throughout the psyche, into every corner of “ordinary” life. When you are ablaze with your own curiosity, the most mundane task can take on new meaning. Everything becomes fodder for a creative project. A child’s voice in line at the grocery store can become the opening line of a poem.
Mind you, it is not all ebullience and rapture. Working through tough creative problems is precisely that: work. And the rewards are often not monetary or conventional. But those who embrace it come to realize they have no alternative, no matter how long it takes to find all the right timbers to burn in one’s inner fire. Frank Lloyd Wright did his formative work in his golden years, an inspiration to us all.
I close with a passage from Leo Tolstoy from a letter to his wife, Sofya, written May 3, 1897, in his elder years,
“The extraordinary beauty of spring this year in the countryside would wake the dead. The warm breeze at night making the young leaves on the trees rustle, the moonlight and the shadows, the nightingales below, above, further off and nearby, the frogs in the distance, the silence, and the fragrant, balmy air – all this happening suddenly, not at the usual time, is very strange and good. In the morning there is again the play of light and shade in the tall, already dark-green grass from the big, thickly covered birch trees on the avenue, as well as forget-me-nots and dense nettles, and everything is just the same as it was when I first noticed and started to love its beauty sixty years ago.” *
My deepest wishes for a resplendent and creative spring.
* Quoted from Tolstoy, A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett