leo lionni (what a lion-tastic name) worked as an art director for a series of advertising agencies and fortune magazine until he was fifty, at which point he moved to italy and wrote & illustrated children's books for his remaining forty years.
he writes of the urge to make things, citing jacob bronowski in thinking that our precursors first became human "when
pithecanthropus erectus picked up a stone and kept it for future use," suddenly filled with the "imagination and will to make things" that will define humanity from roughly that point onward.
the idea of making, whether an art object or any other object, just the using of the hands for some otherwise-unattainable end, certainly characterizes being human. animals will construct things, out of natural materials and largely built in natural methods, such that it is theoretically possible (if unlikely) that you might find them naturally occurring without intervention. humans on the other hand insist on harnessing their surroundings to such a degree that either through physical manipulation or chemical recomposition and combination, we make things that could never have occurred without our help. it is a uniquely human drive, uniting our species through the millennia.
as for the chinese painter, painting a tree, becoming a tree? any time you are sufficiently absorbed in some task (absorbed! not absently working while doing something else) it is impossible not to become what you're doing. This is true in a deep metaphysical sense as well as a simple semantic one. if the "first person" in your head, the i or the me, is quiet, blocked out, and all that fills you is the painting of a tree, then as much as you are anything in that moment, you are the tree. you are certainly not yourself unless you're present inside your thinking, giving first-person commentary to your actions and experience. if inside you is only tree, you are thinking tree, and feeling tree, and you are painting tree, you, likewise, are tree.
i am absolutely the kind of thing-oriented person about whom he speaks but not in any materialistically ambitious sense. i am thing-oriented in that i anthropomorphize and consequently empathize with any object i come across with enough attention to spare. i am also thing-oriented in that i, like lionni, would collect things, warehouses full of things, things that are beautiful or exciting or fascinating or useful or important. i am thing-oriented like a magpie is thing oriented, fixated on the collecting, the keeping, the saving.
when it comes to my drive to make things, it has less to do with the urge to create a novel object and more to do with the utilization of some aspect of collection. i don't feel any pull to spontaneously generate (as i feel very few people can, in the first place, if any) so much as react to the things that i want to keep, to try to possess them and make them my own, to turn them into something that i can call mine.
