For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature.
The wide open nature of any truly creative artistic endeavor is one of its most important virtues, and one of its harshest realities. Only the most determined, hardest working, capable and creative will make their way to earning a good living by their art.
Every culture from the Egyptians to the Mayans to the American Indians to the Bedouins created bestiaries that enabled them to express their relationship with nature. Ashes and Snow is a 21st-century bestiary filled with species from around the world. Nature’s orchestra includes not just Homo sapiens but elephants, whales, manatees, eagles, cheetahs, orangutans, and many others.
I actually started to think a lot about the difference between a creative gesture and a noncreative gesture. I decided that all gestures were creative. Because you always have to make a decision at some point.
If I'm writing and doing music celebrating the Creator, who is the most creative being in the world - I mean, when you look at nature and when you look at all of the beautiful created things - why should I be limited in expressing myself? He's creative, so why shouldn't my music be creative, too?
From the living fountain of instinct flows everything that is creative; hence the unconscious is not merely conditioned by history, but is the very source of the creative impulse. It is like nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.
The highest prize we can receive for creative work is the joy of being creative. Creative effort spent for any other reason than the joy of being in that light filled space, love, god, whatever we want to call it, is lacking in integrity. . .
Persons of genius, and those who are most capable of art, are always most fond of nature: as such are chiefly sensible, that all art consists in the imitation and study of nature.
To a rational being it is the same thing to act according to nature and according to reason.
Live according to Nature, runs the maxim of the West; but according to what nature, the nature of the body or the nature which exceeds the body? This first we ought to determine.
Everyone is creative, but me and my colleagues are using a different definition of creativity than is implied when people say they are not creative. We believe that people are being creative if they are bringing out their highest inner resources to improve their lives and those around them. Those who are living from their core, and doing what they are destined to do, are being creative, no matter how mundane their work or profession might seem.
In part, art completes what nature cannot elaborate; and in part it imitates nature.
Again, if the world is destroyed, it must needs either be destroyed according to nature or against nature. Against nature is impossible, for that which is against nature is not stronger than nature. If according to nature, there must be another nature which changes the nature of the world: which does not appear.
The beautiful in nature is the unmarred result of God's first creative or forming will,and ..the beautiful in art is the result of an unmistaken working of man in accordance with the beautiful in nature.
I believe it is no wrong Observation, that Persons of Genius, and those who are most capable of Art, are always fond of Nature, as such are chiefly sensible, that all Art consists in the Imitation and Study of Nature. On the contrary, People of the common Level of Understanding are principally delighted with the Little Niceties and Fantastical Operations of Art, and constantly think that finest which is least Natural.
Nature constantly imitates art.
Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.