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THE CRITERIA by which to JUDGE SPECTARAMA Part 1

John C Howard Portrait Photograph

Artist are peculiar people. They are peculiar because they are individual. They are individual because they have particular needs in their personality. The satisfaction of these needs lead them to the necessity of being creative. Our main purpose here is to explore the phenomena of creative experience. To study those states of being that involve inspiration... The state of inspration that leads to active collaboration in creativity. Creativity is not merely an idle dream, nor a make-believe satisfaction derived from phantasy spinning, but an activity involving our total being. An activity in which we orient ourselves to reality in a manner that enables us to discover for ourselves and describe to others, new aspects of reality that have not been recognized as distinct and different.

The originality of a work of art, is the manisfestation of the attitude, motives and procedures of the artist in his working process. If the artist has the purpose of enlarging his experiences by his work, the art that he produces has the possibility of being original. Original art is predicated on the assumption that its purpose is to present a new aspect of reality. And all original art does this. The creative artist not only welcomes the addition of new experiences into his assumptive form world, but aggressively seeks them out, and by this process he broadens his orbit and enlarges his world. In like process he carries along to accept this new aspect of reality into their orbit.

Spectarama Image Escape Into Fantasy - Black and White

To orient ourselves to reality we must develop insight into the process of our perception so that we may distinguish the different aspects of reality and discover the part that each perform in developing the creative attitude. I said at the begining that the artist is individual because he has paticular needs in his personality to be creative. He is individual becuase he has awakened from the half-slumber the average man lives in. He is aware to the extent that he is able to experience himself, as the separate entity he is... as the indivdual.

If we are to understand what is involved in the process of creativity, we must depend upon the scientific knowledge of those people who are devoted to the exploration and verification of the mental process. We certianly must agress that artistic creation is a product of the human mind, and that it involves communcation between the artist and his audience, even though that audience may be limited to the artist himself. On the other hand, becuase of the obscure nature of the creative process, as it occurs in the mind of the artist; it is probable that only rarely would the artist realize the full significant and total self envolvement in the production of a work of art.