Excerpt from The Journey
By Lilian Thomas Burwell
The original intention of my entering the field of art education was to supply the bread and butter my body needed in order for me to be an artist. Fifty years later, now primarily the artist, I find that I have never recovered from being an educator. I feel compelled to pass on knowledge of the primary forces that have enabled me to find answers critical to survival as a woman, as an African American and as a person constantly needing to adapt to the new and threatening realities of our times. There is no doubt that one of those forces is the creative. I mean to encourage and inspire the pursuit of original and individual vision. Without this, there is no seed for a collective vision and action upon which hope for renaissance depends. I feel that people as a whole, and my people in particular, have found strength in adversity largely by being true to their individual inner spirits. Those spirits are nurtured by community, but empowered by originality. It is the life force we do not dare deny. I believe that my experience can give one example, a documented piece of evidence, of how the creative potential of one person is in the process of being realized. This is my story of the unfolding of the creative process as one of an evolutionary nature fed by life experience, belief systems, and yet somehow the seemingly separate life of the art itself.
