This column got bumped from the newspaper this week and last because of lack of space in the Entertainment section….

My daughter turned nine week before last and had a birthday party at a local painting studio.  Armed with acrylics and big pre-sketched canvases, she and 8 or 9 other girls all painted the same subject—which in this case was a corgi dog puppy—but the individual paintings they created were as distinct and different as the young artists themselves.  Looking at the results made me think about the relationship between creativity and art.  They’re not synonymous.

In what way is creativity related to art, which traditionally has been the manifestation almost exclusively associated with it?  Clearly the two concepts are closely linked, and with some kinds of artistic expression the answer is obvious.  For example, painters and sculptors, both abstract and representational alike, create a work of art that emerges from a particular vision.  The only other player in the equation is the viewer who has no real role in the process beyond appreciating the final result.

But in other fields of art, the relation to creativity is more complicated.  In music, for instance, there’s most obviously the creativity of the composer, but to what degree are musicians who are playing a piece of music written by someone else—sometimes literally centuries earlier—engaged in a creative act?  What they’re doing is without a doubt artistic but to what extent are their actions creative?  Theater is the same way.  Shakespeare was a creative genius who wrote lines that actors still strive to recite faithfully today.

Does this mean that musicians and actors are somehow less artistic than painters and sculptors?  No, it just means that their art exists in a different way.  Some of the art inherent in music and theater exists only in performance.  (This is also what makes attending a live concert or theater performance more of a participation in the arts than is sitting at home and listening to a recording or watching a movie.)  After a painter conceives of and then executes a work, that work of art is complete and finished.  Composers and playwrights, however, are completely dependent on musicians and actors to bring their work to life, or back to life, later.

In music and in theater, the performers depend on technical abilities honed through years of practice to carry out their actions.  A violin player must know how to play a run of sixteenth notes up and down the fingerboard, and an actor must know how to recall and say lines in a way that looks natural and invested with genuine emotional understanding.  But beyond such technical aptitude lies something else that transforms rote repetition into a creative act.

That something is imagination.  Nearly everyone has heard some performance or another that could best be described as “unartistic.”  In such cases, it’s usually the human imaginative element that’s missing or insufficiently developed.  Like a painter who projects herself into a painting to understand it, gauge what’s needed, and determine when it’s finished, a musician must project some portion of himself into the piece he’s playing to make it as alive for a contemporary audience as it was for the composer who created it.  It’s the same way with an actor.  The creativity of a performing artist comes when he or she, through an imaginative act, puts art itself back into the ink scratches on the paper.

To return to the example with which I started this column, the creativity of those girls painting pictures manifested itself in how they invested part of their own imaginations into the strictures of a predetermined picture.  The result may not have been good art now, but it was an exercise in their creativity, which someday may give the world something truly artistic.