I don’t know if people outside of Australia are seeing this but over the weekend Google have tipped their hat to Australian artist Arthur Boyd to acknowledge his 90th birthday.

My little corner of the world – the Shoalhaven, on the south coast of New South Wales – was a particular source of inspiration for Boyd. He’d often depict the Shoalhaven River in his works. He and his wife Yvonne gifted their property and collection to the Australian people (you can find out more about Bundanon here).

This advice seems like a double edged sword – on one hand it seems quite encouraging to know you’ll improve over time, on the other hand it seems depressing that it will take such a long time. But it is true, I’m sure.

It’s the mark of a seasoned artist actually, at least as far as I can ascertain, to not be so hung up on judging their own output. In my experience I am always wary of being judged, I invariably preface posts with my artwork with words like ‘beginner’ or ‘amateur’ in part because I want to give context but also because I’m hoping random passers by will be gentle.

I came to realise that I had a fear that I was actually quite invested in. As much as I hoped it wasn’t true I came to realise that a part of me wanted, perhaps needed, it to be true. Because so many of my life’s decisions had been informed by the expectation that it was true. If this fear wasn’t real – and I had the increasing feeling that it probably wasn’t – I had wasted so much time and energy and emotion for nothing. It was a sobering awakening. And an awakening I made over coffee…

I was sitting in a local cafe, reading Julia Cameron’s The Right To Write. She was writing about honesty and vulnerability, and talking about a book by Kenny Loggins and his wife Julia about their relationship. I couldn’t tell you what it was about that chapter that triggered me but the next thing I knew I was scribbling down a poem and there on the page was the answer to that baffling dilemma that had been bothering me for months.

I won’t share the poem at this point in time. I’ve been invited to submit some material for possible inclusion in a future compilation and I think I will include it in that submission. (In any event I will share it with you at some point in the future.) I guess I am just impressed by the clarity of it all, and how literally months and months of wrestling with things I didn’t quite understand somehow resolved themselves in a short poem.

You know what – cafes have character too. I know this because my favourite local cafe died recently. Actually there’s a cafe there in that same building, but it has new management and it’s become a completely different place. In a very real sense it is no longer the cafe I fell in love with. The sensuous jazz that once filled the building has been replaced with top 40 radio with loud obnoxious songs with jibberish lyrics and clunky screaming ads. (Once you’ve enjoyed your mocha with Sarah Vaughan having to sip it to the sounds of Lady Gaga is no picnic.) The seats and plates and cups have been matched and colour coordinated, red and white everywhere you look, they remind me of the way toadstools are depicted in children’s picture books. The plates used to be white, simple, they used to be a foil for the delicious food that rested on top of them. There are shiny new appliances, and the new owners and staff are genuinely lovely, but I mourn for what I’ve lost.

It’s funny how we tend to be aware of character mostly when it changes. I think of The Last Airbender movie. Admittedly I’ve only seen the trailer, but as I watch it I’m struck by how faithfully they’ve recreated specific action sequences from the animation on which the live action movie is based. But I also notice that the characterisation seems to be a little underwhelming. Saving the world might be the goal for their great adventure, but it’s the characters we become endeared with and that’s mostly because of their quirks. Aang, for all his superpowers, is still a basically a kid and in the animation he has a youthful enthusiasm that we as viewers enjoy, not to mention his sincere but often awkwardly expressed feelings for Katara. His talents as an ‘airbender’ show us what he can do, but how interacts with his friends and enemies show us who he is. This to me is what character is all about.

I think too of a kid’s show my niece enjoyed when she was younger, In The Night Garden. The show is aimed at quite young children, and the characters don’t really speak – at least they don’t use any words adults might recognise. Certain sequences are repeated in every single episode and an unseen narrator introduces the characters and situations. Yet, oddly, you are left with a strange sense of who exactly these characters are – what makes them unique, what they value (a security blanket in the case of Iggle Piggle for example), and how they interact with each other. Creating characters isn’t always easy and to do it without the use of dialogue is particularly impressive.

Cliches are bad, right? Well I want to suggest that personal cliches are useful in establishing character continuity. I want to go further and say your own personal cliches as a writer are the corner posts of what we might call ‘your voice.’ The particular way you like to combine your words, that thing you do with the semicolon. We get to know these characters – and perhaps more importantly – we come to expect specific things about them. Ocassionally they’ll do something to surprise us, perhaps as the plot develops, but mostly they’ll reinforce our understandings about them. The best example I can think of when it comes to personal cliches is The Simpsons. Can you imagine Mr. Burns without thinking about him say, “Release the hounds!”? Can you imagine Homer visiting the Kwik-E-Mart without hearing Apu exclaim, “Thank you! Come again!”?

Can you think of some characters – be they fictional, living, inanimate – that have left an impression on you? Leave me a comment.

Adam WarRock:

For those of you who don’t know, I recently quit my miserable job as a lawyer to be a full-time emcee and creative person. Since then, I have received an amazing outpouring of support and goodwill from people who wanted to help support me and my music. So I contacted my DJ, Ruckus Roboticus, and begged him to give me a beat so I could make a full-fledged professional song to give to you guys who wanted to donate a few bucks my way. We got the idea for the song, and it kind of spiraled out of control into the song that stands before you.

It’s without a doubt the best thing I’ve ever done: it’s meaningful, it’s clever, and it’s sincere in all the right ways, while still being dope, if I do say so myself. This comes in NO small part to the amazing beat and production that Ruckus put together, the great guitar work of Conrad Dillon and the awesome artwork from Chris Haley of Let’s Be Friends Again.

You can download Adam’s album – you get to name the price – from his Bandcamp site.

It seems rather apt that this is the only thing I’ve posted all week. I’ve actually been preoccupied with the task of regaining paid employment, and while I am not ‘starving’ I am very time poor. I guess (for most of us) it’s just a balancing act – of time, energy and financial resources.

Julia Cameron:

When people undertake writing, it is often not with the agenda of writing but with the agenda of “becoming a writer.” We have an incredible amount of mystery, mystique, and pure bunk around exactly what the phrase means.

The bottom line, the fact that the act of writing makes you a writer, barely enters the equation at all. Instead, we come up with ideas like “Real writers are published,” or “Real writers make a living from their writing.” In a sense, we are saying, “Real writers get validation from others that they are writers. They have apeared in _________. They have received quotes from ________.”

With mythology like this, with a product-not-process orientation like this, is it any wonder that the aspiring writer is seized by anxiety? Even those gifted with a silver tongue doubt that they are gifted with a silver pen. The blank page strikes them like a blank check where they may be asked to fill in an amount larger than the talent they feel they possess.

The act of writing makes you a writer. So go write.

I include this performance of Sophie B. Hawkins’ SweetSexyWoman here not for the performance itself so much as for something she says during the adlib.

I better not get on this piano. This is a brand new piano and it’s just been tuned so I’ll just stay right here. ‘Cause I don’t wanna be sued or something even worse – I don’t want to be criticized.

I’m sure Sophie is being more than a little tongue-in-cheek here, but who hasn’t at least once stumbled at a creative challenge thinking “What will they think of me if I do this?”

Sophie is a great example too. Many of her creative decisions have been criticised over the years. The original video to her biggest hit Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover was deemed too provocative and banned. When she decided to write a song to be played on a banjo – the instrument being a gift given to the singer-songwriter – her record company decided the banjo should be replaced by guitars. This tension ultimately saw her part ways with Sony Music/Columbia Records and saw her re-release the album independently.

Infact she literally woke up the day after being fired as a percussionist for Bryan Ferry and wrote that song Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover. She admitted that when she shared the song Big Beautiful Bottom In My Face (only released as a B-side) with the person it was inspired by they were less than thrilled.

I really think creative expression is all about taking risks, doing things in ways they aren’t normally done and posing questions that no one is prepared to ask. Just think, whenever you are worried you might be criticised realise you might also be on the verge of creating something powerful.

I came across this video from YouTube user ScratchingCat today.

Without really reflecting upon my own motivation/procrastination (something I’ll save for another time*), a thought occurs to me. Is there any benefit to identifying/labelling your own behaviour? I mean, on the one hand you could identify your personality traits and perhaps establish strategies to work inspite of those. But on the other hand there is an opportunity to explain or justify an inability to get things done. You can say “I would love to do that, but I’m a procrastinator.” And then there is this thing with “self-sabotage.” It is a remarkably common expression but how many people go around sabotaging themselves? The whole idea strikes me as quite curious indeed.

[* And yes I realise the irony of postponing a reflection on my own procrastination.]

Your [creative] block doesn’t want you to see that. Its whole plan of attack is to make you irrationally afraid of some dire outcome you are too embarrassed to even mention. You know rationally that writing or painting shouldn’t be put off because of your silly fear, but because it is a silly fear, you don’t air it and the block stays intact. In this way, “You’re a bad speller” successfully overrides all computer spelling programs. You know it’s dumb to worry about spelling… so you don’t mention it. And since you don’t, it continues to block you from finding a solution.

The things you don’t acknowledge tend to make you crazy, even outside of artistic endeavours. They seem to linger somewhere in the back of your psyche growing ever louder the more you pretend they don’t exist.

I discovered the most extraordinary book today. To be honest I didn’t quite grasp what it was when I first picked it up, or even when I bought it. Infact I’m still grappling with it. What impressed me was the imagery, the sketches, the paintings, the prose that fills it’s pages. This book is titled, “The Doyle Diary: The Last Great Conan Doyle Mystery.” Let me quote from the inside cover to give you some sense of what it is exactly.

“Keep steadily in view that this Book is ascribed wholly to the produce of a MADMAN. Whereabouts would you say was the deficiency of Intellect? or depraved taste? If in the whole Book you can find a single evidence of either, mark it and record it against me.”

It is difficult to imagine a more poignant or disturbing opening to the bizarre and hauntingly beautiful sketchbook diary of Charles Altamont Doyle, father of Arthur Conan Doyle. The time of writing was 1889; the place, the dreary confines of “Sunnyside,” as Doyle called it, part of the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum in Scotland, where the 57-year-old Doyle, epileptic and ailing, was interned – “imprisoned,” he says, “under the most depressing restrictions.”

I don’t know if Charles Altamont Doyle was a mad man, though I wouldn’t guess it from looking at his work. There were fantastical creatures and fantasy themes, and even a preoccupation with mortality, but all in all the work seems to be quite thoughtful. In fact in places there appears to be a rich sense of humour. Over the course of a two page spread there are a collection of self-portraits. On the left page there are two self portraits. The first looks like a drowned rat, as though he had been caught out in the throes of a heavy rain. The second portrait features the same man though his hair and beard are sticking up on end. The caption reads, “I believe this is technically known as a ‘pick-me-up.’” Perhaps more interesting is the caption that is written across both pages, “These two pages induced by a tremendous headach[e].”

I’ve felt like something of a mad man lately myself. Life has felt like something that ‘happens’ to me almost despite my own actions or involvement. And yes, frankly, it often looks quite crazy too. One night when I was particularly despondent over a slew of “Your job application was unsuccessful” responses I took a page of newspaper classifieds and fashioned a dunce hat out of it. Because that was how I felt, and those job ads seemed to encapsulate the whole messy problematic job search process. I was toying with the idea of using those newspaper ads in an artwork but it didn’t come together. The next thing I knew I was wearing this dunce’s cap.

In a way I never expected, it did actually make me feel better. Because even though it wasn’t a particularly sophisticated expression it made a point I thought was too ‘silly’ to mention. Namely that cumulatively the rejections were getting to me, that I was feeling out of my element and that I felt it quite acutely.

What’s keeping you blocked? What do you have to acknowledge?

Strangely it wasn’t this scenic imagining that got me started so much as when it became apparent that fantastical bubble had burst around me. I was in a hotel room in a city where I knew next to no one and was being essentially ignored by the person I traveled to see. A dear friend of mine accompanied me around the city when he could, but he was in the throes of his own significantly more successful romance and I didn’t want to tread on their toes. I watched a lot of tv in my hotel room. I spent a lot of time in food courts, particularly enchanted with one place that boasted home made chocolates. And I bought a sketchbook and some water colour pencils and a paintbrush. That sketchbook turned out to be one of the best investments I had made in some time. I filled it’s pages with childish drawings and trite poetry – my hopes, my fears, my sadness.

Something triggered me earlier tonight, it made me think of that person and that notebook. I probably won’t share it’s contents with anyone but there were times when it felt like my only friend in the world.

Maybe it would’ve been nice to disappear into the sunset with that particular person. But it didn’t happen and when it didn’t I started drawing in my new sketch book in the hotel room… to alleviate the boredom, to process the rejection, to foster some sense of things. It was an unhappy time but a powerful catalyst. Perhaps ultimately this will prove more worthwhile.