Writing in the arts and its various contexts (original) (raw)
Artful Language: Academic Writing for the Art Student
International Journal of Art & Design Education, 2009
The task of writing about the process of making and contextualising art can be overwhelming for some graduate students. While the challenge may be due in part to limited time and attention to the practice of writing, in a practice-based arts thesis there is a deeper issue: how the visual and written components are attended to in a manner that neither is subjugated and both are fully realised. Helping students to revision art and writing as similar creative processes that can be structured around a framework designed to address both processes can override the conception that writing and art are polarising forces. This article describes one such framework that was found to be effective from both the perspective of the professor and the student in fleshing out the heart of both artistic processes and finding an integrating structure that moves a thesis to fruition.
Translated by Heather Dashner Some of the most common questions my students and readers ask me are: Does inspiration exist? How is a writer trained? How does the creative process in writing happen? What do you recommend us to start writing? And although these might seem to be very simple questions, the four are interlinked and have differing degrees of difficulty, since each can be answered in different ways. About Inspiration In classical antiquity, it was believed that writers-and artists in general-were inspired by the Muses, the nine Greek goddesses who breathed life into art. They were referred to under the generic name of "Mneidae," which means "remembrance." The daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, each was related to one or several art forms and fields of knowledge: the greatest of all was 2 Calliope, the muse of epic poetry and eloquence; she was followed by Clio, the muse of history and also epic poetry; then came Erato, the muse of love poetry; the fourth was Euterpe, muse of music and, in particular, the art of flute playing; the fifth, Melpomene, was the muse of theater; the sixth, Polyhymnia, who invented the lyre and harmony, was the muse of music and dance, as well as geometry and rhetoric; the seventh, Talia, was the muse of comedy and bucolic or pastoral poetry; the eighth, Terpsichore, was the muse of light poetry and dance; and the ninth, Urania, was the muse of astronomy and astrology. According to the Greeks and Romans, the nine helped poets and artists by providing divine inspiration and ordering their thoughts in different creative ways. This is why it was even common that at the beginning of a composition, the aoidos, or bard, would invoke the Muses or Mneiae, asking them to narrate or sing. Theogony, by the Boeotian aoidos Hesiod (7 th century BC), consists of a long genealogy of the Greek gods from the beginning of time. In 1022 verses, he describes the muses as unequalled singers of soft, lily-like voices and petalsoft feet, who, "on Mount Helicon, high and holy,/. .. begin their choral dance on Helicon's summit./ So lovely it pangs, and with power in their steps/ Ascend veiled and misted/… Treading the night, and in a voice beyond beauty/ They chant:/ Zeus Aegisholder and his lady Hera of Argos,/ … And the Aegisholder's girl, owl-eyed Athena,/ And Phoibos Apollo and arrowy Artemis,/ Poseidon Any self-respecting noble in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was not only skilled in arms, horseback riding, and hunting, but also in the art of composing ballads, that is, in writing verses and composing for and playing a musical instrument. Alfonso X, for example, in addition to fulfilling his functions as monarch, was a composer and promotor of the arts; that is why he was called "Alfonso the Wise." And numerous lay poets belonged to or served the nobility mastered the minor arts, or even the fine arts, such as the troubadour
Artistic composing as representational process
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 1997
Sigel's distancing theory and notion of representational competence provides the framework for examining students' interpretations of literature through artistic depictions. Through their productions the students represented not only the relationships they saw in the literature but also their own experiences as reflected in the action in the story. Their texts then served as representations that enabled them to reflect on their own experiences. The research procedure, which required students to respond to a videotape of their composing process, further prompted them to develop the material text they had created into a mental representation of their vision of themselves as instantiated in the characters of the story. The students engaged in three processes during their
CREATIVITY AND WRITING: CONCEPTUAL MAPPING
Academia Letters, 2021
Recent exploration of psychological studies of the creative person, process and product in the domain of literature required considerable discrimination and clarification of related concepts and phenomena (Stoycheva 2020). This paper continues the work of differentiation and integration of perspectives within the conceptual space that creativity and writing share. Creative writing commonly refers to two different realities, such as the work of the creative writers who write fiction and the development of one's capacity to write creatively. The journal New Writing. The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing addresses explorations of both the teachings of creative writing in different educational contexts and the literary creativity through the persons, processes and works. Separating fiction writers from non-fiction writers further outlines the role of professional writing across occupations. How does creativity relate to writing as an individual competence, a professional activity, and literature? What relationships between aspects of creativity and instances of writing can be identified? Writing as an individual competence Gardner (2011) defines linguistic intelligence through individual abilities to master language phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and skillfulness to exercise them. In spoken communication, one relies on nonlinguistic input from gestures, tone of voice, and the surrounding situation. In contrast, in written communication, one has words alone to express oneself appropriately. Mastery in writing is manifested within the context of a particular writing practice where one's writing produces a work that can be observed, read, and compared to other writings. Different levels of writing expertise are best appreciated in these roles and situations
Editorial The ethical purpose of writing in creative practice
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2007
In place of educational bureaucracy, we envision a more joined-up, student-centred, collaborative, ethical, and ecological approach to learning, making and doing. At the institutional and economic level this would entail a closer integration of research, practice, and teaching. In effect, this suggests a unified field that acknowledges writing as a catalyst to a variety of practices such as ideation, visualisation, thought, speech, action, drawing, making or research. A more integrated learning environment will foster new practices of writing, which could become a common ground for staff from many disciplines. Students would also benefit from this process. We wish to develop and share this vision. We believe that, if it is imaginable and shareable it is also viable.
IDEA JOURNAL, 2012
Words and pictures are ubiquitous, inhaled with morning coffee and exhaled in conversations, skype encounters and daily life. It might be argued that navigating between the visual and the written always involves an oscillation, a turning between variably activated modes that both depend upon and deny each other. On the relationship between words, the visual and their manoeuvres, an impressive array of scholarly analysis has been undertaken, with careful shifts, Manichean separations and precise nuances. But words and images do not occupy a general condition and instead can be understood to operate in cartels, organizations and cultures; relations between words and pictures are played out in bureaucratic structures and strictures, constrained in informational science and institutional habits particular to social and cultural groups.1 Within building and design cultures writing is often treated in an instrumental fashion (albeit subject to specific disciplinary codes), and is frequent...
Editorial: Creative Writing and Arts // Editorial: Escritura creativa y arte
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2016
Longer than memory we have known that each animal has its power and place, each a skill, virtue, wisdom, innocence-a special access to the structure and flow of the world. Each surpasses ourselves in some way. Together, sacred, they help hold the cosmos together, making it a joy and beauty to behold, but above all a challenge to understand as story, drama, and sacred play. (173) One of the founders of human ecology, Shepard (1925-1996) conceived of this discipline as an intersectional field, embracing biology as well as philosophy, environmental history along with anthropology and psychology, thus paving the way to what we now commonly call the "environmental humanities." In all of his works, from Man in the Landscape (1967) to Nature and Madness (1982), a very special emphasis falls on the co-evolutionary pathway of our species. The way we experience, know, speak, and imagine the world-even our sense of the sacredhave been shaped, Shepard acknowledged, by this long encounter with nonhuman animals. Perception, language, creativity, culture: this is what happens "when species meet," as Donna Haraway would say a few years later. Once more, the integral role that the "animal humanities" play in this broader trans-disciplinary debate is validated: if nonhuman animals have made us human, as Shepard maintained, then the humanities are unthinkable apart from this radical co-implication. And this mutual predicament is what our Ecozon@ issue titled "Animal Humanities, or, On Reading and Writing the Nonhuman" explores. Here again the connection between the "Special Focus" cluster and the Creative Writing and Art section proves to be extremely strong. As Deborah Amberson and Elena Past write in their superb Introduction, "it is precisely here, in the space of literary language, cinematic image, artistic creation, ethical thinking, and the philosophical imagination, that the nonhuman animal, long defined as being without logos and without reason, might speak most clearly." The variety of creative contributions in our section-two sets of images, a noticeable selection of poems, and a comic short story-could not resonate better with this statement. Let us explore this rich array in full detail. The first contribution is visual, and it consists of a choice of six pictures from the project Great Apes in Feminine by Spanish artist and ecofeminist activist Verónica Perales. The project, which is vividly illustrated in the artist's abstract, is meant to give visibility to the female subjects in primate studies, often obscured by