When the artist loses self in the art, then the art comes to life.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
One must not only be an artist; one must become art itself. Then to those who are so absorbed in their work that they forget themselves, that capacity, that intuition, that skill will come naturally. They begin to do wonders, and their art becomes a perfect expression of what they had in mind. … People think that it is the artist who has made it; in reality, it is God who has perfected it. As it is God’s pleasure to create the world, so it is also God’s pleasure to create through pen and brush and chisel, to give life to what is lifeless.
Artists who have arrived at some perfection in their art, whatever their art may be, will come to realize that it is not they who ever achieved anything; it is someone else who came forward every time. And when artists produce a perfect thing, they find it difficult to imagine that it has been produced by them. They can do nothing but bow their heads in humility before that unseen power and wisdom which takes their bodies, their hearts, their brains, and their eyes as Its instrument.
Whenever beauty is produced in art, be it music, or poetry, or painting, or writing, or anything else, one must never think that humanity produced it. It is through us that God completes the Creation. Thus there is nothing that is done in this world or in heaven that is not Divine Immanence, which is not Divine Creation. …
What is art? Art is the creation of beauty in whatever form it is created. As long as artists think that whatever they create in the form of art is their own creation, and as long as they are vain about their creations, they have not learned true art. True art can only come on one condition, and that is that the artists forget self — that they forget self in the vision of beauty. … We are vehicles or instruments that respond. If we respond to goodness, goodness becomes our property. If we respond to evil, then evil becomes our property. If we respond to love, then love becomes our possession.
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
By this means God created the world, and partly in imitation of Allah it is wise to follow such a course. Metaphysically speaking there is another explanation. Energy and magnetism are imparted to us with breath. When the breath is used to praise God or is returned to God with fervor and remembrance, this increases the capacity for inspiration. In every form of inspiration — whether one understands it spiritually or not — all interest is focused in one’s work. Then the divine breath touches every portion of one’s being and this passes into the form which the artist is shaping — be one a musician, poet, architect, artisan, or any other molder of beauty.