Meditations on Creation
I was thinking during my violin lesson this week about the contrast between two of my main hobbies. After Kerry Ferguson’s book, I like to think of them as two sticks and a string and four strings and a stick. The first being knitting, the second being violin playing. (Or rather, violin learning. I can’t really play it yet.)
The thought occurred to me this week that there is a disparity between the art involved in knitting and the art involved in the violin. The creative process with knitting starts with harvesting your fibers, preparing them and spinning them into yarn, then knitting them up to create your product.
With the violin, if you start from a similar base-materials place, you have to carve your wood, put it together, varnish it, and string it together. There’s a lot of craftsmanship involved in building a violin. I suspect there’s a much higher baseline of talent involved with that than there is with knitting – just about anyone can do a scarf or some potholders and be “a knitter”. I think it’s a lot harder to build something that can really be considered a fiddle.
So, you’ve got a knitted object and you’ve got a fiddle. This is where the disparity comes into play. The knitted object is, with very few exceptions, a mostly practical thing. You’re going to wear it or use it; you’re not really going to do anything with it. (If you’ve got counterexamples, please let me know.)
But the violin is clearly a starting point for another craft. Musical instruments can be very ornate, with a lot of non-functional embellishment added to them. The craftsperson who makes the fiddle has their own thing going on, completely uncoupled from the musician who will use their creation later on.
This got me to wondering about how long these craft production chains can be. Now that I think of it, the chain in knitting is at least three crafts – you’ve got people who make spinning wheels, which are used in turn to make yarn, which is used in turn to make sweaters. I think it stops there – I’ve never seen anything made out of a sweater.
With the violin, you’ve got the violin maker, then the musician. And these days, with electronic music and sampling, you can extend the chain another step. Electronic musicians use the output of other musicians as one of their raw materials.
I wonder if there are any craft chains like this that are circular? Can anyone think of an example?
Just some idle wonderings that I thought I’d share today.
January 13th, 2005 at 4:17 pm
sexkontakte in koln http://sexkontakte-in-koln.mt-forum.com/
March 1st, 2004 at 11:17 am
I make other things out of sweaters. Felt ‘em down and you’ve got great fabric for making purses, guitar straps, coaster, you name it. Sure, it’s a *small* extension of the chain, but an extension nontheless.
February 28th, 2004 at 1:43 pm
Sorry, David. I can’t refrain from jumping in on this subject.
Creativity CAN follow chains. I always like to think of that cool british tv show Connections, where they show how ideas have inspired other ideas throughout time.
Craft taken from one source is conformity. Like latchworking a mallard duck pattern. Then if you follow the Connections philosophy of superimposing concepts on one another to make new ideas, then that becomes creative. Creativity is NOT LIMITED to chains or connections however. Sometimes it’s about osmosis.
Some musicians will take a song they know and play with it until it becomes a new melody. Some artists have a million melodies in their head and it just blends into something new.
I write my lyrics by the osmosis method. Otherwise, I could not talk about things I care about that are going on.
Even with knitting. Someone had to figure out somehow or another that that blob of seeded cotton could be used for making string. There’s where the genius was. And then to figure out that you could weave it all together using chop sticks.
It’s all very clear once it’s been done, but to break through that threshold of what is versus what could be–that where the magic is.