Creative or Artistic

I'm wondering tonight about creativity and artistic abilities. I'm wondering if a person can learn either or both. I tend to believe that creativity is something that can be learned but being artistic is more of a gift.

I think creativity is like a learned skill because it is used in so many different areas. Trouble shooting problems takes creative thinking, doing a puzzle takes creative thinking and there are many other things. It's possible to take someone and teach them to put together a puzzle or to think outside the box when solving a problem. This all falls under the heading of creativity.

Artistic ability on the other hand, I don't believe can be taught. Can you really teach someone to take a blank piece of paper and then have them create a masterpiece? When I look at a blank sheet of paper... that is really all I see. I have read about artists and how they think... I have looked at design books... read about techniques and still... nothing.

We learned during the Truth Project that there was a time in history when the Church was the center for the arts. The speaker made a really good argument for why the Church needs to regain that status, his argument was that our God was the ultimate creative one and that if we are created in His image, then we should be creative as well. It makes sense to me and makes me wonder if it is yet another thing that we lost in the fall.

I really want to move from being simply creative to being more artistic. I would like to understand the art behind the music, to be  able to see the picture behind the blank page, to hear the poem before putting it on paper and to visualize the portrait before snapping the picture. If my God is the ultimate artist, then being artistic is what I want to be, because I want to be like Him!