Creation & Discovery

September 10, 2025


Art has always felt like something more than just marks on a canvas or movements of the hand, it’s something primal, something that whispers from a place beyond time. It's often called the alchemy of humanity, and rightly so. Through art, we shape the intangible, give form to feeling, and pull from the depths of our consciousness in a way that can’t always be explained. It’s not just self-expression, it’s something sacred. And when we sit in front of an easel or a blank page or a slab of clay, there's a strange sense that we’re not just making something new, we’re uncovering something that already existed.

This is the paradox that has echoed through the centuries: are we creating, or are we discovering?

Many artists will tell you it doesn't feel like it comes from them at all. It comes through. Like a current moving through the body, using the artist as a channel, a conduit. The images, ideas, emotions, they don’t feel manufactured; they feel unearthed. And in those moments of flow, where the world fades and the mind disappears into the work, you begin to sense that maybe the art was already there. Hidden. Waiting. Your job isn’t to invent it, but to find it.

And yet, in the act of finding it, you are shaping it. Guiding it. Making decisions that bring it to life. That’s where the beauty lies, in the fact that creation and discovery are not opposites, but reflections of each other. To discover something within yourself, something raw and wordless and honest, and then bring it into the visible world, that is creation. And to create something from your own hands that feels older than you, that feels like it’s always existed, that is discovery.

So maybe the question isn’t which one is true, but how deeply they’re connected. When we create, we are in dialogue with something unseen. Something ancient. Something uniquely ours and yet completely universal. We aren’t just producing art, we’re remembering it, revealing it, rediscovering it. It’s not a matter of ego or control, but of surrender. Allowing what’s inside to rise to the surface, and trusting yourself enough to follow where it leads.

Whether the work emerges in a flash of inspiration or slowly over time, it’s still the same mysterious process. You find the piece by making it, and you make the piece by finding it. That’s the magic. That’s the alchemy.

In the end, creation and discovery are just two names for the same sacred act, bringing what was once invisible into the light.