I’m an attorney-turned-sculptor. The tension between Bill-the-artist and Bill-the-intellectual influences my art in a unique way. Sometimes I find myself pushed by the intellectual side of my brain to over-think what I’m doing. But then the right side of my brain draws my art back to the balance I seek.
This same tension is played out between Bill-as-realist (a lawyer is the ultimate realist) and Bill-the-artist. Back in 1911, Freud in his work “Two Principles of Mental Functioning” described this tension:
The artist is originally a man [sic] who turns from reality …, and who then in phantasy-life allows full play to his erotic and ambitious wishes. But … with his special gifts he moulds his phantasies into a new kind of reality, and men concede them a justification as valuable reflections of actual life. Thus by a certain path he actually becomes the hero, king, creator, favorite he desired to be, without pursuing the circuitous path of creating real alterations in the outer world. But this he can only attain because other men feel the same dissatisfaction as he with the renunciation demanded by reality.
While no one has yet elected me “hero, king, creator, favorite,” I love the power of the artist-as-creator.