Top or Bottom?

Here was my thought while driving yesterday: there are two kinds of creative people. Those who visualize the ideal and then try to create something that resembles their ideal as completely as possible, and those who take bits and pieces of reality as starting blocks and see what they can create from that.



Top Down People....

Those who visualize the ideal might create a reasoned-out guideline to how the work should be organized. They know what they want, but not necessarily how to create it. Theirs is a world of symmetry and order with a rational mind at work behind it trying to approximate the perfection they imagined. They can be dissatisfied when their creation isn't perfect according to their pre-determined ideal.



Bottom Up People...


are realists, in a sense. They work from the bottom up, with pieces of reality whether it be an overheard sentence, the look in someone's eye, or an old car part. They imagine the potential of that thing in connection with this other thing. Their world is forever in pieces that they are trying to put together, which can be chaotic but also full of endless possibilities.


That's not to say people can't behave either way at different times, but I definitely lean toward the latter. What do you think? Does the top down/ bottom up distinction make sense to you? Are you a top or a bottom?

Why We Create Art

That question has been running through my head the past day or so. You can google "why we create art" and get responses in varying degrees of inanity and less than helpful lists. Fundamentally though, creating art is not Darwinistic and it does not pay. Yet it feels much more vital than a hobby, which is what the hierarchy of life would reduce it to.

People create for many reasons, and often when discussing it they say they enjoy the process or they want to express themselves. But I think expression implies two parties. We create for other people to read or see or hear. Even while I say I write for myself because I enjoy it, there's more. I write with the purpose of communicating. Even in personal journal entries, I explain situations as if I didn't know what happened in my own life. Maybe that's just me. To some degree, if I can finish my novel satisfactorily and no one ever reads it I will be proud of my efforts. Yet I want people to read it and I wrote with the implicit goal that if a person read it, he/she would understand the story I am telling.

So yes, we create for ourselves. Yet somehow the expression isn't complete if there is no one on the other side to see it or hear it or read it and recognize it's existence. It becomes "like dead letters sent to him who live, alas, away." If a tree falls in a forest with no one there to hear it, it doesn't matter if it makes a sound.