When you create do you do it from a preconceived system? Or, does the very nature of your everyday life feed you creativity? According to William Blake, the world in which we live has much to answer for our artistic zeitgeist.

“Rome & Greece swept Art into their maw & destroyed it: a warlike state never can produce Art. It will Rob & Plunder and accumulate into one place, & Translate & Copy & Buy & Sell & Criticise, but not make. Grecian is Mathematic Form: Gothic is Living Form. Mathematic Form is Eternal in the Reasoning Memory. Living Form is Eternal Existence.”

William Blake (Excerpt from ‘On Homer’s poetry’)

Is Britain this “warlike state”? There are of course ‘conflicts’ going on in Afghanistan and Iraq, which are part of a catchy, if not terrifying, soundbite ‘the war on terror’. There’s also a ‘war on drugs’ in progress, which has escalated with the reclassification of cannabis to Class B – a war on 3 million plus UK citizens.

Britain certainly has a proud history of perpetual affiliation with international military matters i.e. a warlike nature; but what form, our art?

By Mary ShuldhamIt would seem, on the surface, that Blake is absolutely right in his claim. As it is, when the cultural perspective on art is so heavily entwined with economic machinery, there is a drift to golden rules. It’s not only the countless reams of articles on the prices of art in the national press, seen in the same places, by the same people; but an entire infrastructure.

Take, as a case in point, those of us who are involved in working for the ‘creative industries’. The place in which Blake’s “warlike state”, the sure “Mathematical Form”, of art takes place - “The Reasoning Memory”.

A system of value is used in breaking down each individual’s creative product. Fewer and fewer have complete creative control over their project; they are a constituent part of gross creativity. Formulas of value are worked out by product & industry destination, time, budget - By figures and logical reasoning. Commercial art, both in design & advertising and in any art that stinks of being a ‘product’, is then “Mathematic Form”.

Of course “Mathematic Form” can be used poetically, Escher, archaic sculpture, but the difference lies in the division of creativity. It’s a case of Marxist alienation; thousands of people with vast creative gifts, in a hundred different fields, who are chained to a vast, static, creative ideal – Not of their own making. Industry.

But what of the “Living Form”; Blake’s “Eternal Existence”? Are we just simply trapped by a “warlike state”?

On an occasion, a corporate graphic designer finds himself home, alone, on a rainy day. He chances upon wondering about his past and remembers how he used to paint on rainy days at university; perhaps under a smoky haze with a glass of red wine and all for the sake of joyous indulgence. Suddenly, with an inspired spirit, he rushes upstairs and digs out his paints from the corner closet and spends the rest of the day creating sunshine. His is not a “warlike state”. His is a “Living Form”.

Blake’s use of Gothic is telling. Gothic art was a narrative, not a numbed command or vital statistic, which told stories both religious and secular. Over the course of two-hundred years Gothic art became a changing narrative in itself; meanings and emphasis, shifting and evolving. Can we, like Gothic art, create a “living form” for the 21st century that embodies the grand changing narrative of society?

Far to few of us are lucky enough to work purely along the lines of own creative impulses; our story-telling. Once we understand the formula of industry work; the standard editing sequence, inverted pyramids or to avoid using MS Comic Sans; then what we do becomes a job alone. We begin to dream of other lives; filled with creative freedom.  

Don’t pin your creative hopes on “Translate & Copy & Buy & Sell & Criticise”, only pin your monetary hopes on them. The “warlike” nature of state, the machine as it were, always remains. The “Living Form” is where you can touch upon the subject of art, the “Eternal Existence” – Here, the interior perspective, there are no creative hopes; only fulfilments. Go forth and create for the love; for in love and creativity we have true Being.