Between Art and Archaeology…

Creativity has been heavy on my mind here lately. It started about two weeks ago, I had a couple conversations with two other creators and I’ve been mulling it over ever since.

While I was doing some writing and research for the recent episode of my podcast, I came across this quote the great Renaissance artist, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti.

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it

It really hit home for me.

The suggestion is that every stone, every canvas, every blank page has a secret to tell, a concealed story to reveal, and it’s the artist’s job to find it and bring it to light.

The artist is not necessarily ‘creating’ something but, exposing something.

Maybe we could say that the artist is a kind of archaeologist, in that, it’s the artist’s job to dig deeply, to brush away the dirt, debris, and rock and to uncover and unearth a hidden history.