One day, my 8 year old son came and showed me a cartoon that he drew. I was impressed at the budding cartoonist. I asked him how he got this idea and he said that he copied from his favorite book. Um.. , I was disappointed but did not show it. Why? Because it was not his original work. It was imitation. I was expecting original work from my kid! Nothing wrong in my expectation but nothing wrong in imitation too. After all, he drew it – the proportion, the shading and everything that was black on that paper.
Recently, I was reading a book “On Wrting” by Stephen King. Interesting memoir. He wrote about his childhood days when he used to painfully copy the stories and show to his mom! He explained the act by saying “Imitation precedes Creation”. This hit a cord and started me thinking on this subject.
As a child, I used to draw and paint well – but always an imitation, always by looking at another painting! As I grew old, I did not feel that it is an artwork, rather it was a copy work and stopped it. Did not nurture it further to change it from copy work to art work. It does not happen in one day. I now realize that if I had stayed in that path, then over a period of time, I would have become an artist! A real one! But I never gave myself that opportunity. I expected creativity out of me when I was ready. Creativity takes time and effort. It does not happen in one day. Till then you have to be satisfied with imitation. You have to be happy that you are doing a good job of imitating; thriving to be better and better at imitating the great works of others. You have to be happy when you take the baby step of making few modifications while copying to give a personal touch. This eventually develops into more personal touch and finally to a original piece of work. I missed that opportunity. It is sad. The sadder part is that I am repeating the same mistake. My son did not come to show me his next art work for long long time. He probably read my expression and felt that it is not his cup of tea to come up with creativity and so he is not going to try that at all. Thanks to Stephen King, I am going to set this right now.
Creativity comes from within! Yes, I agree. But only after you have enough substance built within you. An artist doesn’t become an artist from the first day. He works through numerous throw a away art before he makes the first good piece. He probably starts with scribbling art work in the corners of his school notebooks and slowly develops into a good one. Ideas come only if you feed yourself with enough material. A writer probably has numerous unpublished stories before he becomes a best seller novelist. How do we start anyways? Most of them start with copying at some level. May it be art work copied while you were kid or a story written based on your book report when you were a kid. We all imitate good work because we thrive to get there. Our inner wish is to write as good as them but we can not and so we try copying. Looking at copying with a scorn is probably not the right thing. I think it is a good idea to start with imitating, improvise the copied version and slowly progress to the creativity level. Look at education. A physicist doesn’t become one just after reading basic physics. He spends years understanding Newton’s laws before he progresses to Einstein’s relativity theory and then string theory. He goes through the process of understanding all his precedors work, and then builds upon that. Why do we scorn when the same thing happens in art or writing! We need to change the way we think about imitation. If we imitate enough, we will reach a point when we think that “I can do better than this” and from there embark on the journey of creativity.
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