I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
[It] is when art acts as an agent of transformation that we may correctly speak of it as a gift.
Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
Hyde describes how a person is transformed by the gift of art:
We could speak of artists’ lives and artists’ creations in a similar fashion. Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself.
I was converted to art by the art of my grandmother, and by her example of how to live a creative life.
But the transformative power of art when it is gifted isn’t immediate, writes Hyde:
[A] transformative gift cannot be fully received when it is first offered because the person does not yet have the power either to accept the gift or to pass it along.
And:
Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude. Moreoever, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor. The transformation is not accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms.
Hyde uses the example of the gift of how to become sober, given through Alcoholics Anonymous’ tenets and meetings:
AA has “twelve steps to recovery,” which more or less summarize the program. The twelfth step is an act of gratitude: recovered alcoholics help other alcoholics when called upon to do so. It is a step in which the gift is passed along, so it is right that it should be the final one. In AA they speak of people who are “two-steppers”—that is, people who take Step One (accepting they are an alcoholic) and then jump directly to Step Twelve (helping others) without the in-between steps where the labor lies. They try to pass along something they themselves have not yet received.
In what way is a gift of art like a twelve-step sobriety program?
My grandmother identified as an artist, like someone who goes to AA may come to identify as an alcoholic. She showed me by example how to live as an artist, not a professional artist, but as someone whose art infused her life and flowed out and infused other people’s lives. Similarly, in AA, people who attend meetings don’t just learn by being explicitly taught. Instead, they learn through hearing stories and practices that other people share: “here’s what I did after I started drinking again to return to sobriety,” “here’s what I did when I faced grief and wanted to turn to drinking but found an alternative,” and so forth.
When I first started painting abstracts, I learned from other artists. I followed tutorials from Adele Sypesteyn and KR Moehr. I bought books created by abstract art painters and followed their instructions, read their tips.
At some point, I felt ready to share my paintings with the world. I felt ready to pass the gift along. I know that it was passed to other people; they have told me so.
This is a curious power of being an artist. Not the power to create something so that someone might hang it on their wall: the power to create something so that another might be motivated to create too.