Plenary Expansions Part I: The Artist in the Art
Deep down, everyone wants to be an artist.
A great piece of art can instantly transport us to a place where we can get reconnected to long-lost parts of ourselves and experience being whole again. It’s instantly transformative and healing.
Who wouldn’t want to have created works that have this kind of effect? Who wouldn’t want to have been the kind of person who wrote The Lord of the Rings or painted the Mona Lisa or wrote the screenplay of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?
When we experience a transformative piece of art, our curiosity naturally turns towards the artist. How does an artist produce a great piece of art? What is their process? Of course, there is no formula. But the general perception is that a real artist would be a living embodiment of the values that shape their art. The way they live their lives becomes the fertile soil in which the seeds of art take root. Every piece of art they create is a plenary expansion of themselves.
Plenary means complete, whole. If a piece of art is a plenary expansion of the artist, it means that that piece of art is the artist herself. The artist’s soul lives in that piece of art. Atlas Shrugged is a plenary example of Ayn Rand – she is the book and the book is her. Similarly, The Lord of the Rings is the plenary expansion of J. R. R. Tolkien – he is the story, the entire mythology.
Art can be a plenary expansion of the artist, only if they have been genuine and true to themselves in the act of creation. (In a somewhat similar vein, Oscar Wilde says: “A great poet, a truly great poet, is the most unpoetic creature of all. But inferior poets are fascinating.” What he means is that great poets pour the entire essence of their being into their poetry, so that nothing is left in them to show – everything they are is in their poetry. But lesser poets don’t pour their essence into their poetry, so they still have something in them that can be fascinating to others.)
Plenary expansions also reveal an integrated sense of the self. Most of us walk the earth rather broken and disjointed. Our lives are like pieces torn out of a whole, each piece being flown away by its own wind. Usually, the pieces are work, family, friends, hobbies, philosophies, religion, ideas and opinions etc. Rare is the one who has tried to consciously integrate these disparate branches of life.
Actually, all of these dimensions of oneself should be stemming out of the same core. Like a tree. Everything about a tree actually stems out of just one seed: the stem, the branches, the leaves, the roots, the fruit; even the secondary gifts like the shade, the wood, and the help in the ecosystem. All this comes from that one seed.
True artists are like that. All of their plenary expansions branch out of that one core, one seed, one acorn. It’s their DNA, replicated in every piece of art.
That’s how all of us crave to be.
Deep down, everyone wants to be an artist.
(Disclaimer: I am not an artist in the traditional sense; neither have I been interacting with artists per se to form a general opinion. I am a teacher, a learning experience designer and someone who is passionate about learning, about the artist’s way, about creating, about startups and in general about becoming a better person. I write about these things based on my own experience and thinking. If you don’t agree with any of my views, you are welcome to initiate a dialogue. But be polite, kind and respectful. Trashy comments will go where they rightfully belong.)
