“In the creative process you learn by paying attention to life…and how it works,” says world famous pianist, Moises Fernandez Via, about his creative process. Moises currently employs this in his position as Project Curator and Researcher for the Arts Outreach Initiative, an innovative partnership between Boston University College of Fine Arts and the Medical Campus. Moises explains that just as in life people make mistakes and learn from them, in the creative process artists can consider new directions for their art to take as a result of what begins as a mistake. Moises describes such an experience that occurred while he was working with a lighting technician for his project that would combine different lighting scenarios with music. Once, during an important scene in the performance, he asked the technician to change the light in a certain way that would be appropriate for the music. The technician accidentally flipped the switch so that it lit up the room with small candelabra. Though he had not planned for it, Moises instantly knew that this perfectly complimented the piece of music and used it in the final performance of his project.

        The project arose from when Moises’s friend showed him a landscape that exhibited the qualities of light and dark. Again, although he had not planned to create a musical performance centered on light and dark, once he experienced the creative potential for such a performance, he embraced it. For Moises, art does not exist in a vacuum with a perfect, unchangeable shape but is a product of experience. He explains that thinking in terms of right and wrong in relationship to art results from an “overly moralistic society” which bifurcates “good and evil.” In truth, Moises argues, life is much more complicated. An artist’s creativity is marked by how the artist responds to experiential impulses and how the artist channels them in his or her creative endeavors. For this reason, Moises explains that he prefers to interpret art in terms of consequences. A piece of art can unfold in a plethora of different directions, but it is the way in which an idea immediately begets another idea and forms a certain direction that distinguishes art.

      Still, Moises insists that his interpretation of art does not render him a renegade. Rather, he alters the standard classical performance because he believes that is it true to the art, not because he wants to revolt against the traditional perfomance. He explain that “you can’t create anything without knowing who you are and knowing who you are means being honest with your emotions. This intellectual and emotional honesty as an artist is really what I try to put in everything." He wouldn't feel like he was being honest if the music was presented in an insufficient manner. 

     In terms of his creativity, Moises describes the experience as losing perception of his self and awareness, to the point that he forgets his own name. But this experience is not the artist's ultimate goal. Rather, the artist's objective is to transform his "individual ability" into collective opportunity, Moises presents the decision as follow: “when you experience the creative process you have two choices. You can lock it is a prison and entitle it or you can just embrace it and engage in it.” He chooses the latter option  because “It is difficult for me to have this entitlement. I think it would prevent me from discovering all [of creativity’s] dimensions and all its possibilities. ”