As in, your music or painting or poetry explicitly outlines your feelings and beliefs (or does to those who are particularly observant and insightful), but if asked about same in normal conversation you would not discuss it or acknowledge these exact same themes (or maybe explain them away as “mere” poetic musings). Is this somewhat typical of a lot of creative types?
I know a fair number of creative types, and, no, they express themselves in lots of ways. Their art may be the most profound – how often do we talk about love in daily conversation? – but only barely.
In fact, it’s one of the fairly well-known hazards of writing: when one talks about a story idea, it takes some of the oomph out of writing the story. It gives some of the same gratification without the meaningful accomplishment of page-count.
In my experience, creative people are expressive by nature, and – my word! – that involves an awful lot of talk! Creative people are garrulous!
(“I’ll loquace you like you’ve never been loquaced before!”)
Speaking only for myself, yes and no. I like to express myself in all sorts of ways, but it often isn’t understood, if it’s even perceived as an expression. It’s often clear if I’m talking about something, for instance, I end up having to give lots of examples and analogies to try to express myself. The thing is, both emotionally and intellectually, the concepts that I’m drawn to express, while very clear and simple in my mind, are actually exceedingly difficult to express since they aren’t just made of words. So if I want to express an intellectual concept, it gets confused because of all the other interdependent concepts or if I want to express an emotion, it’s impossible to describe it with the precision that is necessary to fulfill the need for that expression.
But when it comes to putting it in art, for me typically music and poetry, I get to take the time to craft the message. For instance, if I’m writing a musical piece, I get so much more to work with besides words, I get to manipulate the timbre, tempo, time signature, scales, dynamics. I can make subtle references to other works of my own, or other artists, and draw on the experiences of the audience to paint that picture. It’s always interesting to perform a new piece for someone and get their reaction, and it’s quite amazing to me just how precisely that message can be communicated.
But really, for me, just talking about whatever it is I feel the need to express artistically, while it’s something I enjoy, never quite fulfills that need. It’s like a thirst that just cannot be quenched. When I want to express it, I don’t just want the audience to understand what I went through, I’ll know I’ve well expressed myself when I’ve brought them on the same journey that I went through. There’s some things that just can’t really be understood unless you’ve experienced it to some degree yourself. Art is the bridge between sympathy and empathy.
I have no problem expressing myself, whether through my art or verbally or any other way. But there are entire facets of my personality that are challenging to express in the kind of art I do, but I can easily express in other ways. If I composed music, it would be a lot easier to put all of me into that music, but the kind of visual art I do doesn’t lend itself to that . . . and there’s no law that says it has to. My art is very graphic (as in “graphic arts”), and its emotionality comes more from the viewer than from me.