Aurora Rosselli on Art and Creativity Through the Female Experience

A woman’s creative process is unique as a result of history and our vision. Appreciating the achievements of creative women not only for their artistic value but also for constituting an act of liberation, transgression, and recovery of our identity in history is fundamental to continue opening spaces and expanding our possibilities of creation.

Many times, we have heard it said that imagination is worth more than knowledge, that the most important thing is to think “outside the box.” However, imagination, and more specifically, creativity, needs to be nurtured by knowledge. In other words, we can’t think “outside the box” if we have a box, to begin with. To understand this notion better, we are joined by an Italian-American Fine Artist with over 20 years of experience in the creative and arts, Aurora Rosselli.

Aurora Rosselli explains how creativity is transcendental

She adds, “creativity has the value of being the transcendental result of knowledge: it is the reconstruction or reinvention that can be made of something within a certain discipline, after having complete control over it. This means that the idea that creativity is detached from knowledge or that it is enough to be creative to develop great things is wrong. Work, discipline, and commitment make up that place where creativity is born.”

Creativity is also the engine of knowledge. Thanks to creativity, we can invent new possibilities that rupture occurs, that unique and wonderful works emerge, and that result becomes a new knowledge.

Effeminacy and creativity

For a long time, we were led to think that women did not have the same “genius” or the same creative capacity as men, because in history there were no women who had reached the level of Michelangelo, Botticelli or da Vinci.

However, today we know that the prevailing inequality in Western societies throughout their history deprived women of the art system, beginning with academies or artistic training. Not having the required knowledge or training, her possibilities were, to begin with, limited.

How were women going to develop great works of art if they did not have the knowledge required to become experts in the medium? The few women artists that we find in history, before the 20th century, are daughters or couples of artists who, although they had access to some learning, were limited to creating works on specific subjects such as still life and animals or landscapes.

Yet its scope is extraordinary. The female artistic referents that we have today are wonderful not only because their achievements were, but because they transcended despite everything.

Today we have a much broader tradition of women artists, creative women in general, who have broken paradigms and transformed or defined entire genres in literature, painting, sculpture, photography, and many other branches and disciplines.

That freedom that many women discovered in art gave them the possibility of discovering something that had previously been limited to them and transcending it. The transgression that art allows is a transgression that arises naturally in the creative process. It is genuine. It is personal –if not individual–, it is radical most of the time. That is why the female artist – a Frida Kahlo or Ana Mendieta, Rina Lazo or Luz Méndez de la Vega, Margarita Carrera, Regina José Galindo – deeply experiences a feeling of freedom; that is why her work is a product of it. Many women continue to do so today in their communities and cultures: their creative work consists of multiple acts of liberation. Just turn your eyes and look at them carefully.

Seeing through female eyes

Many women who developed in the arts are examples of liberation for many other women in other areas. They are role models in the sense that not only by going against the tide, they managed to establish themselves in the middle but also by their insistence and folly in being faithful to themselves, their ideas, and their creative process.

The creative urge is a human thing. As we know, it is not something that lives only in the arts. It is something that we experience from a young age. In moments of deep concentration, it usually appears and propels us in unplanned directions, often uncontrolled but usually giving way to surprising results and emotion without the same. However, that impulse is often silenced by other people, by routine, by our fears. The fear of failing, the fear of “what will they say,” the fear of facing ourselves, is our most direct and pure version, it stops us and forces us to put ideas away, to keep that intense force that would otherwise have led us to an unexpected place. Fear is part of creativity, but it shouldn’t silence it. Fear, like knowledge,

Rosselli shares, “many women have experienced this – well, we women don’t know what fear is. Therefore, so many women have given us lessons about strength, freedom, and creation, and the relationship between them and fear. I mean by “seeing with female eyes”: there is an attitude that we can call feminine in the arts because the experience of women, mainly because of Western history, has been unique. The feminine vision – that is, from the experience of women – is also relevant because it highlights the wide spectrum of issues ignored by history and academia and realizes that there is a hole that must be filled.”

We have great female artists, exemplary creators, but we still have to keep working on giving women back their history, historical identity, and experience in the world. This is something we can do from our creative work. Create with our position in mind, question our own experience, and clear how that allows us to explore reality and history differently, without fear. Art and creativity, in general, allow us just that.

You call follow Aurora Rosselli on Instagram: @eclisse_creazioni, and keep an eye on the 21^st of August, as she is set to be included in an exhibited held in Catania, Sicily called “Mediterraneum Collection”. Rosselli will be joined by high profile photographers, including Salgado, Newton, Scianna, Horvat, Cresci, and Cartier Bresson.