The artist… like the priest and monk… is the representative of the affirmative integrity of life. By dreaming the dreams of man… because the artist does not speak for himself… he speaks for all men, by dreaming the dreams of man he then begins to change man’s dreams from within. This is the most important point of all. And for an artist the greatest happiness is to have failed at doing the perfect, and the greatest misery is never to have attempted it.
Self-expression is not creation. Creation is transformation, something quite different, and no transformation takes place unless the energy is qualified and denied by limitations. For self-expressionists there are no limitations. But the real creative artist immediately has a vision and a perfection. You imagine something is infinite but then it has suddenly got to be in concrete shape. The shape, the size, the whole thing resists you, and this qualification is pain, and the pain purifies the energy and transforms it––[It is] the problem of incarnating it in a denser way––. That is where the purification comes in. The energy becomes transformed through this mutual qualification and then it’s in a state of grace.
Real creation of a work of art has nothing to do with having ideas that you wish to put in action, or having a programme, no matter how grand––”it is a revealing, an unveiling of the nature of reality through evocation and through climate, atmosphere, through musicality. And therefore it’s always active, always alive––the idea or the vision is already within me in a seed form and the working of the material excites the seed and it unfolds within me. And I participate in this unfoldment, knowing when to come in, I hope, and trying to come in when it is necessary to give it a little bit of form in this way or that way, and not trying to interfere with it too much––to let it reveal itself. The whole problem is one of becoming sensitive to its intention, its unfolding. It knows perfectly well what it wants to do, and I mustn’t interfere with it. On the other hand one has to control the energy, to give it form, to be participating all the time in it. It is a wonderful balance between revelation, as it were, and form.
Various Excerpts from Cecil Collins as referenced in The New Monasticism.