The Courage to Create by May Rollo

Author:May, Rollo [May, Rollo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1994-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

FOUR

CREATIVITY AND ENCOUNTER

I WISH to propose a theory and to make some remarks about it, arising largely out of my contacts and discussions with artists and poets. The theory is: Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.

Cézanne sees a tree. He sees it in a way no one else has ever seen it. He experiences, as he no doubt would have said, “being grasped by the tree.” The arching grandeur of the tree, the mothering spread, the delicate balance as the tree grips the earth—all these and many more characteristics of the tree are absorbed into his perception and are felt throughout his nervous structure. These are part of the vision he experiences. This vision involves an omission of some aspects of the scene and a greater emphasis on other aspects and the ensuing rearrangement of the whole; but it is more than the sum of all these. Primarily it is a vision that is now not tree, but Tree; the concrete tree Cézanne looked at is formed into the essence of tree. However original and unrepeatable his vision is, it is still a vision of all trees triggered by his encounter with this particular one.

The painting that issues out of this encounter between a human being, Cézanne, and an objective reality, the tree, is literally new, unique and original. Something is born, comes into being, something that did not exist before—which is as good a definition of creativity as we can get. Thereafter everyone who looks at the painting with intensity of awareness and lets it speak to him or her will see the tree with the unique powerful movement, the intimacy between the tree and the landscape, and the architectural beauty which literally did not exist in our relation with trees until Cézanne experienced and painted them. I can say without exaggeration that I never really saw a tree until I had seen and absorbed Cézanne’s paintings of them.

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