I grew up with a mother who rocked at baking. I mean, you name the cookie, the pie, the cake, and she could make it. Just give her the recipe and an hour or two, and soon you’d be feasting on sugary goodness.
Though we may not have them every Christmas nowadays, my mom used to make sand tarts (no sand actually involved) every holiday season. While they weren’t necessarily my favorite cookie that she made, I still wasn’t gonna turn one down if you offered one to me. As I recall, they were the only cookie my mom made using a cookie-cutter. She had various shapes like candy canes, stars, and Christmas trees. She’d roll out the dough into a thin layer and press the cutters into the sheet. Add sprinkles and time in the oven and voila!
But back to the cookie-cutters. See, those cutters were really handy. Why? Because they were consistent. Push one in the dough, and the same shape is formed. Press, shape, repeat. Press, shape, repeat. No variance, no outliers.
Cookie-cutters are great for baking cookies, but might I propose—no, plead—that we leave them out of our art?
Certainly, there are many, many different perspectives on what art is or is not. I’d likely have different views on it than many of you, and you’d have different views than each other. I’m not going to make a case for any one definition of art. That’s not my goal. I will, though, suggest that the purpose of art (while acknowledging that this may be true to greater or lesser extents depending on your definition) is to reflect on our experiences in this life and speak into or about, through various avenues and mediums, our perspective and outlook on this life.
Assuming that purpose for art, who can or should make art? Well, everyone! Everyone has experiences and perspectives on those experiences. Thus, everyone is capable of producing art as a means of expressing their perspective. But if everyone is capable of art, that leaves us with a three-letter predicament: how?
Here is where I fear we sometimes make a serious mistake: we answer the question. “How do I create art?” “Well, you see, here’s what you do…” We give guidelines. We give steps. We give rubrics and requirements and prerequisites that must be in place before something can be deemed “art.” Of course, to spell out the “how” is to imply the “what.”
And it’s at this juncture where I want to be very, very careful because I am not prepared to say that we ought not answer the “what” question as it relates to art. I fear that post-modern thinking has done much harm to our ability to grasp what true art is (or what true excellence in art is). Once you start questioning the existence of absolute truth, it really is only a matter of time before that affects how you define art—if you define it at all.
I suggest that how we answer “how” is extremely important. It’s one thing to give someone suggestions for how they can start their own process of creating art. It’s another thing entirely to present rules and regulations that must dictate the creative process. At that point, you’re not endorsing creativity. You’re endorsing cookie-cutters. And that just won’t work.
The reason cookie-cutters work for cookies is that the dough (much like the cutter itself) is consistent. Assuming you follow the recipe correctly like my mom, the dough will come out right every time. The consistency of the mixture will yield just right to the cutter’s impression upon it.
The reason that rules and rubrics (artistic cookie-cutters) don’t work in art is that, unlike cookie dough, life simply is not consistent. Period. Of course, there are many elements of life that are timeless. Human emotions like joy and sadness (though perhaps expressed differently from culture to culture), the consequences of sin like death and suffering (though, suffering, perhaps manifested in different ways depending on the sin or the time period), and the sovereign presence of God that has always been and always will be. Yet, even in the midst of consistencies such as these, there are, however, many, many variances in our lives today when compared to, say, the lives of Roman citizens at the peak of their empire.
Perhaps you’ve heard or said something like this: “I wish we were making the kind of movies, music, etc. like back in the good ol’ days.” I understand the sentiment behind that. (I’ve said similar things myself.) However, to a degree, I want to say in response, “Eh…I think we’d think differently about that if we really did “go back” to the old ways.” Reason being that the “old ways” were a reflection of their perspectives on their lives. We can’t have a perspective on any life other than our own. That’s not to say that the music, movies, or novels of the past cannot or do not deeply impact us today and prove to be very relevant to our lives now. However, I would argue that for us to go back in time, create an artistic cookie-cutter based on their art, and attempt to use it today would prove far less fruitful than we perhaps think.
I’m a songwriter. I write lyrics and put them to music. If you asked me to teach you how to write songs, I would gladly oblige. But I would do so by offering you the methods and practices that I’ve come to utilize while also making sure you understand that there is no one way to write a good song. If you ask one hundred songwriters what their creative process looks like, you may very well get one hundred different, unique, equally valid answers. More than that, if you ask one songwriter what their creative process was for one hundred of their songs, you may very well get hundred different, unique, equally valid answers to that question as well. Why? Because life isn’t cookie dough, and sometimes the worst thing we can do to our art is to take a cookie-cutter to our experiences and expect the results to be pretty.
You know why my mom used more than one shape when making her sand tarts? Because using just one shape for all that dough would’ve been boring. Sure, it would’ve gotten the job done, and I’d still be eating cookies. But it was never only about the cookies. It was about the uniqueness of each one. Should our art be any different?
