One of the more troubling things I've encountered over the years is the notion that creating a work of art is something frought with chimerical muses which bless and then in turn curse the various artists who seek to ply their skills to visualize... as a metaphor of psychological frustration, this may indeed be apt - but as a reality to accept as a norm, it is a falsity, and on many points...
To begin with, it is a pandering to a fantasy holdover from times in which one knew little of the ways and means of thinking beyond what was termed 'common sense', and appeals to an unknown 'other' served as an excuse to avoid the full self-responsibility of grasping the nature of what it is an artist is to do with the skill developed... to be blunt - if one does not know where one is going with their art, then they do not know what they are doing with their art, however much one protests that it is 'an adventure in discovery' [so is driving drunk down an unknown road at night with the lights out, but certainly not one seen as desired]...
The consequences are two-fold... there is a false notion that thinking about what it is one is to do in their rendering is something to be avoided, as it supposedly 'dries up' the imagination or rushes away whatever 'muse' one had to begin with - which is actually an anti-human mentality, as it is one's reasoning faculty which is the human's fundamental means of survival, of being human... all the higher animals emote, as it is a development of refinement in attuning the organism to surviving more than if it not had it - but only humans cognate, have the capacity of knowing, and thus being able to act on that knowing, building on it with further knowings, taking under advisement the emotions and analyzing them as to their validity [any real basis to that emoting, or just assumptions], and flourishing then as humans in the process... no, despite most conventional notions, there is not an inherent conflict between reason and emotions - any living organism, by the grace of its living, must, of necessity, be an integrated being, humans included... the only catch is that in humans, one must learn how to use its distinguishing characteristic, as it is not an automatic... and indeed, the more it is used, the more integrated one becomes [provided, of course, one not suppress the emotions but attune them to what is known, not what is presumed]...
The second consequence is the familiar one - the so-called 'artist block', wherein there arises a problem in how to compose, or what to compose, and why compose it in the first place...
Art is a selective re-presentation of reality according to the artist's fundamental value-judgment... this is to say that the artist, in looking at the world about, selects what the artist considers [in the context] as fundamentally important to visualize - to pick and choose those aspects of the material around, and give the artist's spiritual visualization, or meaning, of it all... this, by its nature, means all works of art have themes, even if the artist does not consciously grasp what that theme may be... if the artist is more determined to think of the themes involved, to be conscious of why certain scenes or objects arranged brings about certain emotional responses, the consequences are that the results will be better composed, and the substances better chosen and more dynamic in the visualizing... further, in being so conscious of the theming, variations invariably will arise, thus widening the imaginating and increasing opportunities for further works to be rendered - an ever spiraling outward in multiple directions which in turn insure no lack of composing ideas... and no such thing as a 'block'...
