Art was never of large importance when growing up. With a mother who is an engineer and a father that is an architect, my upbringing was rather pragmatic. Because of this apathy towards art, most of my beliefs about art and creativity came from the culture around me. One of these beliefs was that a piece of art comes fully from within the artist; that, to be a successful artist requires being a special class of person akin to a demigod. I believed that to be an artist you had to be born with some intrinsically special quality. This was not a well thought-out viewpoint it was simply what I had accepted from the culture around me. Nonetheless, this was the viewpoint that I held until I saw “Your Elusive Creative Genius” by Elisabeth Gilbert.
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She said that this idea was one held by ancient Greeks and Romans so I researched the Roman “genius” and the Greek “daemon.” I learned that they were similar ideas but, in particular, the Roman genius was a divine nature that every person was born with and died with. It was an outside force that gave a person their various abilities. This and other research I did in Plato’s “Symposium” and some writings from the Renaissance not only verified the credibility of her viewpoint but added to my understanding of the concept that she was describing. My literature class later verified this assumption. Previously, I had always seen classic literature as beyond my reach. Not only were the creators god-like beings, but for the literature to be so extraordinary it must be beyond my comprehension. Through this literature class, I learned about the writers of these titans of literature who have survived for centuries through their work. I learned that Homer was most likely simply a traveling bard and Shakespeare a common playwright. I learned through literature that art itself is based on transcendent themes that, though uniquely and beautifully expressed, have remained within the human psyche since the dawn of humanity. I saw the same themes and thoughts of death that are expressed in Hamlet by Shakespeare given entirely new light in the Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy. The same themes of redemption were present in Crime and
She said that this idea was one held by ancient Greeks and Romans so I researched the Roman “genius” and the Greek “daemon.” I learned that they were similar ideas but, in particular, the Roman genius was a divine nature that every person was born with and died with. It was an outside force that gave a person their various abilities. This and other research I did in Plato’s “Symposium” and some writings from the Renaissance not only verified the credibility of her viewpoint but added to my understanding of the concept that she was describing. My literature class later verified this assumption. Previously, I had always seen classic literature as beyond my reach. Not only were the creators god-like beings, but for the literature to be so extraordinary it must be beyond my comprehension. Through this literature class, I learned about the writers of these titans of literature who have survived for centuries through their work. I learned that Homer was most likely simply a traveling bard and Shakespeare a common playwright. I learned through literature that art itself is based on transcendent themes that, though uniquely and beautifully expressed, have remained within the human psyche since the dawn of humanity. I saw the same themes and thoughts of death that are expressed in Hamlet by Shakespeare given entirely new light in the Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy. The same themes of redemption were present in Crime and