Poetics & Christianity Ongoing Seminar

"I am an artist"

[Helena Ospina is Executive Director of PROMESA (Promotora de Medios de Comunicacion, S. A.) y Catedratica de Literarura de la Facultad de Letras en Universidad de Costa Rica. Ha sido miembro fundador de la misma Facultad (1974) y profesora de Lengua Inglesa y Francesa en la Universidad de los Andes en Santafé de Bogotá. Forma parte del equipo de Arvo.net. Envía el texto que sigue, animada por lo leído de Barbara Nicolosi, presentando sus convicciones y líneas de trabajo artístico. Bienvenida! JJGN]

Barbara Nicolosi’s exulting confession “I am an artist!” made me confirm certain insights in creativity. Reading Nicolosi’s papers in Santa Croce University’s Rome Permanent Seminar on Poetics & Christianity has stirred all the emotions and convictions hidden in my heart. To have another artist as Nicolosi so outspoken and confident in her vocation, encompassing not only her personal quest but handing out a professional hand to others (by helping them craft their inner vision) is remarkable!

My personal field is poetry. When I started in 1991 the Poetry Collection (50 titles published so far) in PROMESA (a Cultural Enterprise founded in 1982 by my husband), everybody told me poetry doesn’t sell. It was out of reach and destined to special palates in rapid extinction! My personal conviction is that one must make way for beauty in all of its manifestations. I cannot choose to change my talent. It is what it is. It is given. I can increase it or let it dormant. I can wrap it up and keep it closed in my individual self or try to communicate it to others. The latter is what I am doing with a small group of artists who study the potential expressiveness of the poetic image and explore it in the fields of music, ballet, photography, painting, drama… We call this project: “Interrelating the Arts”.

Nicolosi on "isolation and community in the artist's life"

[Barbara Nicolosi has participated as Invited Speaker at the Conference "Epiphanies of Beauty: The Arts in a Post-Christian Culture", November 18-20, 2004, The Notre Dame University Center for Ethics and Culture. This is the text of her notes, taken for this site from the weblog Churchofthemasses. By the way, she will be in Rome, at Santa Croce University, on December 1st. The Poetics & Christianity Seminar members will have an informal seminar with Barbara Nicolosi. Now, the Notre Dame notes on the isolation in the artist's life. JJGN]

ISOLATION AND COMMUNITY IN THE ARTIST'S LIFE

[These are the notes from my talk at the Notre Dame "Epiphanies of Beauty Conference." I gave the talk today and people seemed to like it. Sorry if it's hard to follow in it's spottiness - just imagine me doing the Sicilian hand-waving and filling in all the holes.]

I. Intro….

Thanks for invitng me to be part of this wonderful event. I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I have recently had a short-lived career as a doctoral student. But after just two courses in which we wrangled over earth-shattering topics like “Towards a Practical Theology: Rebuilding a Hermeneutic of Christopraxis” and “Rethinking the Sermon on the Mount as Divine Triadic Transforming Initiatives,” I decided, that I would probably die while scaling the ivory tower, and I should be humbly content to stay in Hollywood and influence the billions of people who make up the ravenous global audience.

I am an artist - a writer and dramatist, and I am the ring-master of a new community of filmmakers in the entertainment industry. We started out in 1999 to try and get better scripts on the desks of Hollywood executives. We created a pedagogical model to address this problem. We find ourselves now, focused on building a nurturing community for our writers, and then standing around the perimeter, rubbing our hands together and hoping that something amazing will happen when we aren’t looking. The classroom phase of the program is basically just the doorway, rite of initiation.

It’s that “when we aren’t looking” that I want to talk about today. The time of isolation that is the prerequisite to every work of art. It is the biggest cross of the artist, even surpassing in weight the cross of their own weirdness.. Mainly because a lot of their weirdness proceeds from the solitude that they have to make their home so often.

I don’t have time today to dwell too much on the necessary relationship between isolation and creativity. You’re just going to have to take my word about it as a practitioner and one who wrangles practitioners.

I will talk about the following:

A) Two Senses of Isolation, one positive and one negative, and how artists tend to experience them backwards.
B) The relationship – I’m going to call it a marriage - between the artist and their art, and the way it ravages them to salvation, and possibly some of us on the outside too.
C) Why Classrooms Will Not Produce The “New Renaissance”
D) What Kind of Community We Need to Create So That We Might See Some Beautiful Art Again At Some Point. (And When I say Beautiful I mean…)