Years ago, during one of my father's attempts at retirement (there would be several), he tried his hand at being what he called an itinerant artist. He has an ability that I envy. He can draw a building - interior or more often exterior - and with a few strokes of a pen, make something that looks like a building. He's an trained architect, which is why the focus is on buildings, but it's still remarkable to watch. During this period, though, when he was trying to sell his drawings, he was told that his drawings were "craft" not "art" I suppose because they were renditions of actual things. I have always taken exception to that. I believe his drawings are art. They require a talent that most of us do not possess. He can draw a few hashmarks and suddenly it's brick. The eye that knows how much needs to be there to create that illusion is an artistic one, not craft.
In the same vein, I have considered my cross stitch work to be craft. I don't create the patterns. I follow someone else's creativity to make something from nothing. It's not original. And it's something that a lot of people can do, with a little patience and a lot of time.
I was just reading an article in Newsweek about creativity. In it, the authors discuss that creativity requires both the right and left brains. Not just the left as conventional wisdom has thought. One side sees patterns, the other turns them into something new. Or the one side searches for something similar in memory, and the other side figures out how to apply it to this new situation. That's creativity. Apparently we as a nation are starting to lose that creative spark. Why is the subject of debate. But that's not what got me thinking.
What got me thinking is the article combined with a conversation I had in a bar recently about a book I've thought about writing for years. It would be about how my ordinary life has been touched by some extraordinary people and events, from the famous to the infamous to the obscure.
But would such a book be autobiography - and craft? Or more than that - and art?
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