Since art touches all of us in some way or another – either viewing or experiencing it in sculpture, painting, music, writing, dance, media, games – you will gain another connection from your story to your audience.
The Defining Myths
Pygmalion was a young Greek sculptor who was disappointed in love. He decided to have nothing more to do with girls. So instead he carved the perfect girl in marble, named her Galatea, and fell in love with her. In some of the stories he even dressed her up and had “tea parties” with her. At a feast of Aphrodite he made a fervent wish that his great work of art would come alive so he could enjoy his perfect love, Galatea. Impressed by his devotion, Aphrodite granted him his desire and the marble statue warmed, quickened, and stepped down off the pedestal and into his arms. According to most of the stories, happiness ensued between the artist and his art.
Competition between artists can also be quite dramatic. Although the Grecco-Roman goddess Pallas Athena invented the flute, she didn’t like the way she looked when she played it – cheeks all puffed out and lips pursed. So she threw it away. A satyr, Marsyas, found it and had quite a talent for music. He received a lot of praise and got rather pompous. He even had the gall to challenge Athena’s half-brother Apollo, the god of music, healing, light, and truth. Rather stupid of a lowly satyr to go up against a god...as he soon found out. Of course Apollo won the music contest. To punish the upstart Marsyas, Apollo had him flayed – skinned alive by whipping.
Exemplar Movies
Amadeus, Shakespeare in Love, Moulin Rouge, The Agony and the Ecstacy
Why it exists (evolutionary back-story)
Archeology and paleo-anthropology have pushed back the origins of art to around 70,000 years ago. The conscious creation of things of beauty and meaning seems to be what separates us most from the animals, though that may be in question as we learn more about them and how their brains work.
See more in Werner Herzog’s film Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
How it works (physiology & psychology)
The desire to create seems built into our human psyche. Throughout much of human history women were naturally creative in that they made new human beings, a miraculous-seeming accomplishment still today. Males, driven by a similar inherent need to create but lacking the natural process of baby-making, tended to be the artists, the inventors, the explorers, the conquerors. Most of those drives are in their most basic form, the imperative to create something new and to leave one’s personal mark on the world. Societies have not historically been kind to women who have taken up the arts, but that seems to be greatly improving across the world.
Art can alter our state of being and take us outside the daily concerns of physical existence. It can bring us peace, inspiration, contemplation, exhaltation. It is no wonder so many religions incorporate art into their rituals, be it music, icons, uplifting architecture, poetry, dance, etc.
Ethnic music and dance help unite a people around their tribal core. It helps create an actual physical unification of the individuals to the group through rhythms and tones and the effect those have on the actual physical body.
THE MUSE - That which sets artists apart from others has been attributed to genius, to being touched by the gods, to being slightly crazy, often including severe mood swings. Many artists have a Muse who inspires them.
Sometimes the Muse is an immortal. The nine Greek Muses were daughters of king god Zeus and Mnemosyne, or Memory. They included Polyhymnia the Muse of songs to the gods, Calliope of epic poetry, Euterpe of lyric poetry, Melpomene of tragedy, Thalia of comedy, Terpsichore of dance, and Erato of love poetry.
Sometimes the Muse is an unobtainable love object, such as the married Ladies [often a queen] in Provencal poetry and in the Arthurian tales of the Knights of the Round Table. Sometimes the Muse is an actual mortal lover, as is the case with many artists and sculptors.
The Muse inspires, connects the artist to higher ideals, and helps them step away from the regular world into the heady world of art and its creation. The Muse opens you up to raise yourself to a higher level. They are the trigger and the conduit for inspiration and artistic focus but you still have to do the work. It’s not like an angel giving you a miracle, you still have to pick up the palette, the hammer and chisel, put your fingers on the keyboard, etc.
When one has lost touch with the Muse, the art stops. Then the search for the lost Muse or for a new Muse begins. The premise of Shakespeare in Love is this search for the Muse.
Do not try to domesticate the Muse. When relegated to housekeeping, child bearing, and quotidian chores they no longer hold that higher, ethereal, artistic frequency so necessary for creation. As Robert Graves notes in The White Goddess, love your Muse but never marry her, or him. See more about this in INNER DRIVES, the chapter on “Marilyns, Moms, and Muses”.
You can however have sex with the Muse. Often rather amazing sex. The sex act and the creative act are similar, but one is not necessarily a guarantee of the other. Sex can be uplifting physically and emotionally, but a Muse should raise your thought processes up to a higher level. The artist with a sex partner completes the physical act. But with a Muse there is no “completion” until you have finished creating the art.
Mythologist Joseph Cambell talks a lot about the muse and his work is well worth looking into.
There’s a new Estee Lauder fragrance called Modern Muse. The logline is – “Be an Inspiration”.
There are three ways to relate to art: create it, critique it, appreciate it. In the chakra system the artistic creator operates from the Throat chakra, home of conscious creativity. The critic may also operate from there via their logical analysis and deconstruction of a piece of art. The critic will often also be coming from the Lower Solar Plexus with a heavy dose of envy. The audience that appreciates art can do so from different chakras. In the Aspirational Solar Plexus position they can be uplifted and transformed; in the Sacral chakra they can be titillated, depressed or frightened; and they can be driven to action from the Root or Lower Solar Plexus position.
How it serves us now
Art can enlighten. It carries meaning across time and culture: e.g. the stained glass windows of Gothic cathedrals visually presented the Bible stories to an illiterate congregation.
Art divides people as much as it unites them. The battle still rages over how to define beauty and art. What’s important to you is that it is still considered an important issue and can provide good story background.
Art can inspire. There’s a great scene in The Shawshank Redemption where Mozart’s music plays over the prison loudspeakers, bringing exquisite moments of joy, flight, freedom, and beauty to the prisoners. Morgan Freeman’s Red says, “I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.”
Examples in Myth and Legend
The myths of Lemuria, the lost continent and race, include this early gigantic form of humanity consorting with other life forms evolutionarily behind them. This “mating with the mindless ones” is said to have produced some of the part-human, part-animal creatures immortalized in ancient art and story.
The Pied Piper of Hamlin leads all the rats out of a town by playing his pipes. When the townspeople who hired him refused to pay him, he started playing again and this time the town’s children follow along as well.
In India, Tansen is revered as a great musician whose skill caused candles to light and temperatures to rise in the room where he sang incendiary songs.
Flute-playing Kokopelli is a diety of the Southwest American Natives, representative of m
usic and fertility.
Greek Orpheus is said to be a rock star. When he played, the rocks sprouted feet to follow him and keep listening to his amazing music.
Examples in History and Current Events
Troubadors spread the lore of chivalry throughout fuedal Europe.
The Renaissance Man or Woman is multi-talented, multi-learned, multi-skilled, and able to converse and write fluently in a number of languages and excel in a number of sports. Science has now explained how music and art contribute to the development of our brains and can make us better in everything else we do. A culture suffers that does not include the arts in education or civil society.
The art of Leonardo Da Vinci, according to the Da Vinci Code and Holy Blood, Holy Grail, held secret codes about the history and the future of Christianity - that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child, whose descendants today still carry the immortal bloodline. Regardless of any hidden meanings, Da Vinci’s art is still enjoyed and revered today.
Concerts raise funds to aid specific causes; for instance, Concert for Bangladesh, Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid, Live Aid for the Ethiopian famine, Shelter from the Storm for Hurricane Katrina, and Healing in the Heartland for the Oklahoma May 2013 tornado victims.
Singer Taylor Swift has said she can only date men that she can write songs about.
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera inspired each other, as well-told in the film Frida.
Pablo Picasso was infamous for the number of Muses he had, many of whom overlapped one another’s reign.
Architecture is art on a grander scale. It defines cultures and influences people, from pyramids to cathedrals - “the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome” - to the intimidating architecture of Nazi Germany with its vast plazas, towering edifices, and 100 foot tall blood-red banners. Across the world today there is a competition to see who can raise the highest skyscraper: Kuala Lumpur has the Petronas Towers, Dubai the Burj Khalifa, and in New York City the always iconic Empire State Building has unfortunately but briefly regained tallest building status in that city.
See more in the BBC series HOW ART MADE THE WORLD.
Examples in Media
Artists make good characters because they are typically driven, unconventional, troubled, attractive, neurotic, brilliant, and as was said about Lord Byron, he was “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” What a great story character!
Writer Christian [Ian McGregor] in Moulin Rouge is torn between his desire to have his music produced and his secret love for the courtesan Satine [Nicole Kidman]. For a delirious while his two loves mesh; then tragically they do not.
Bio-pics about artists can capture the tenor of a time and give your audience a peek into different worlds. For two diverse artists creating at the same time check out the Cole Porter bio-pic De-Lovely and the documentaries and film work of the German director, inventor, and cinematographer Leni Riefenstahl, in particular her Olympia and Triumph of the Will.
And don’t think the writer is a dull artistic character for stories or screen just because they’re not dashing around having wild adventures. They can dish up a lot of drama, comedy, and pathos as in The Last Station about Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, Adaptation, Capote, and Impromptu about female author George Sand and her musician lovers and friends.
Music and movies about musicians offer a myriad of perspectives on the inner turmoils and outer troubles as these unconventional people bump heads with society and conformity - “I Walk the Line” by Johnny Cash, “The Devil Goes down to Georgia” by Charlie Daniels, and bluesman Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads”, also memorably recorded by Eric Clapton.
Music can impell and indicate all the extremes of the human heart. Some examples are Handel’s “Messiah”, Whitney Houston’s “I will always love you”, Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”, and the Irish ballad “Danny Boy”.
And as the poster for an opera says, “Men cheat, women cry, people die...it’s Opera”. Some opera characters are indeed artists, such as Wagner’s Meistersinger, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, the starving artists in Puccini’s La Boheme, and in its modern version, Rent.
Other examples of the love of an artist causing drama include:
Van Gogh, Chicago, All That Jazz, Warhol, Intermezzo, Pollock, The Doors
Men in Black III portrays the real-life artist Andy Warhol as an alien
In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Ann Smiley’s lover Bill Hayden brings her a work of art that becomes a minor but important plot point.
Wierd Science – a version of the Pygmalion myth
The bio-pics Hemmingway and Gellhorn and Sweet Dreams, about Patsy Cline.
Examples in Music
“Vincent (Starry Starry Night)” by Don McLean
"Mona Lisa”
"There could never be a portrait of my love.”
Symbols
Handprints or circles and dots on a cave wall
Petroglyphs
Murals
Carvings and tools
Paintbrush and palette
Statue half-carved
Masks
Easel, canvas
Museum
Ancient artistic ruins
Musical instruments
Pen and Ink
Typewriter
Keyboard
Piano
Sheets of music
Music stand and empty chair
Drawing pads
Charettes
Blueprints
Key Element – The Shining Action
The Calling – the moment your character takes steps towards deciding what they want to pursue. If you can build in 3 to 5 steps along the way, from an initial slight interest to a fervent desire to pursue it, you can keep raising the tensions for your audience. Throw in resistance all along the way and you will increase the dramatic conflict. This Shining Moment will be the first glimpse of the goal: a statue, a film set, a band.
The Culmination – the victory moment, the eventual attainment of the goal. It could be sculpting and seeing it admired in a museum; making a movie and getting an Oscar; playing an instrument in a band cheered by thousands of fans.
The Object of Desire – this focuses not on the character but on what they have created through their desire. The statue, the book, the Oscar on the mantel, the concert, the band’s name in lights....the Groupies.
Written Descriptions
Art is about the exaggeration of reality. It takes something familiar out of its ordinary field of perception and brings it to our attention. It is about presenting what is familiar in an unfamiliar way.
There is a brilliant version of writing about how an artist feels, how they are accepted, or not, by society in Don McLean’s “Vincent (Starry Starry Night)”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_(song) http://www.lyrics007.com/Don%20McLean%20Lyrics/Vincent%20(Starry,%20Starry%20Night)%20Lyrics.html
It’s the passion of the artist who does not care what society thinks but creates regardless of society’s norms that leads him into conflict with society. Passion by its very definition has no reference to financial gain, which is difficult for those without passion to understand.
Artists are seldom into it for the money and most artists don’t make money with their art. It was the same with the early filmmakers and with many still today, particularly the independent filmmakers and those who create web series. Art is for people who are driven to do the art, regardless of its acceptance by society.
No one understood Frank Lloyd Wright when he started out. He was shunned and mocked. Now, he is revered. Like the tragic situation of Vincent Van Gogh, many artists are not appreciated in their own lifetime...more’s the pity.
Because we live in a world where money means so much and defines who we are, it is the trial of the artist to maintain their integrity and simultaneously maintain their physical existence.
Give your characters these challenges. Express the drive, the passion, the new idea that separates the artist from the rest of the
characters in your story.
It might be Hemingway standing for hours in front of a chest of drawers typing his latest novel.
It might be Michaelangelo visiting the marble quarry and choosing the block from which he will carve his next statue.
It could be Monet looking out at his colourful gardens and then recreating them at the pallette.
It could be Sibelius out listening to the winds through the pines and the rough sea against the rocky shore of Finland and then turning it into the evocative “Finlandia” symphony.
When the artist is engrossed in their art, they typically take no note of the society around them. Tell us how they are focused and absorbed in the creation of their art – that will tell us that it is a true Love of Art and not just a commercial venture.
Cinematic Techniques
For grand architecture like a Gothic cathedral or pyramids you want to get the feeling of it towering above us. They were designed to be seen from the bottom up, representing the gods holding sway over man. So give us that perspective of looming, impressive and often oppressive power. The same goes for modern skyscrapers.
Show Me the Love! Page 7
