This is just a quick note to let you know that Mur Lafferty and I Should Be Writing is going to be tackling The Artist’s Way creativity program as an online community. You can follow the group’s progress at the I Should Be Writing website (or subscribe via iTunes or at YouTube) and by joining the associated Facebook page.
I’ve never done the The Artist’s Way as part of a group before and am quite excited at the prospect.
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Kate Bush sings in ‘An Architect’s Dream‘:
Watching the painter painting
And all the time the light is changing
He keeps painting
That bit there
It was an accident
He’s so pleased
It’s the best mistake he could make
Now it’s my favourite piece
It’s just great.
I wrote about getting started. I wanted to write too about knowing when to stop. No, I don’t mean giving up. I mean acknowledging the point at which an individual piece of work (or art) is finished. The truth is you can keep working on something forever, especially if you’re waiting for it to be ‘perfect.’
The Artist’s Way – that book that I am forever referencing on this website – has interesting quotes from interesting people in the columns around the main text of the tome. I particularly like this one from Paul Gardner:
A painting is never finished – it simply stops in interesting places.
I guess the next question is, simply, which interesting place do you stop at?
I wish I had some definitive answer for you. If my couple of months of painting have taught me anything it has been that sometimes I’ll have a profound sense that a canvas is finished. But other times I will have an impulse to experiment, to try something just to see what will happen. And this is great! It is wonderful to take creative risks, to feel like you can do this. But experimenting with a canvas is very different to experimenting with words in a word processor. You can completely alter a paragraph in a manuscript on your computer and if it looks wrong you can change it back. Sometimes you’ll have the luxury of an ‘undo’ feature, other times you’ll just recreate something from memory. It is harder with a canvas. There are very real limits to what you can do to ‘remove’ paint from a canvas.
[And as though to illustrate my point I just wrote a paragraph in this blog and then deleted it to start again. See? It is easier in text.]
So when I’ve painted an eerie graveyard scene and am happy with the canvas I could stop in this interesting place. Only… I can’t seem to do that. No, I’m fascinated by the idea of coloured washes. It doesn’t seem to matter that I’ve never found a personally satisfying application for them in any of the other paintings I’ve done. I’m hung up on them. I think it will give the painting a sense of depth and add to the overall mood. But it doesn’t work out as I imagine. The entire scene is obscured in the process. I have this moment where I think to myself, “You know John, you had a perfectly workable piece of artwork before you did that.”
But I don’t want to beat myself up. Risk is kind of what it’s all about. Creative risk is the reason our parents secretly (sometimes not-so-secretly) wish we’d give up our creative pursuits and work in banks. And I have to realise if I hadn’t been prepared to take some risks I wouldn’t be painting at all. I wouldn’t be writing, I wouldn’t be blogging. I wouldn’t be podcasting. I wouldn’t make videos and put them on the Internet. I wouldn’t be doing any of the things that are important to me if I hadn’t been prepared to experience creative risk.
The other thing worth remembering is that the stretched canvases and canvas boards I use are quite affordable. Infact compared to my university education… you know, I don’t think I’ll finish that thought.
Happy risk taking!
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Mary Richert – in her first Internet video ever – talks about some of her favourite books. In these pages she finds a lot of encouragement and inspiration. I really want to emphasise three points Mary makes in this video.
Everybody struggles. This was a fact that I needed to be reminded of today. [I saw a "Quitting smoking is hard" ad earlier and a part of me scoffed and said, "Really? You should try writing a novel some time, buddy!"] It can really help your perspective to realise that even the people you admire have struggled. It really helps me to come back to John A. Keel talking about the Blank Page and to realise even Annie Lennox has moments of great doubt.
If you want to be creative you have to have input. Quite removed from the romantic notion of the artist as an aloof loner, the truth is creativity is enriched by collecting experiences and ideas. Julia Cameron talks in terms of filling the artist’s well. Australia playwright Michael Gow suggested that when you use your imagination you literally empty your mind. This is a resource that can be depleted. As an artist you need to acknowledge that and work to rectify it.
Sometimes it’s hard to see the big picture. Mary’s work is predominantly in the field of creative non-fiction. Sometimes it is hard to make sense of history while it is happening, especially if it is happening to you. This was something I found working on a memoir project. I was always secretly waiting for a point in my personal life that would lend itself to a satisfactory conclusion for the work. What I concluded was that it was difficult to understand the moment you’re having while you’re having it.
I want to take this opportunity to really applaud Mary on her first video. I’ve been making online videos for several years now and I think a lot of people sit back and think that it is such an easy thing to do. I have very distinct memories early on of being completely unnerved by the prospect and just staring into the lens of the camera, hoping desperately for something intelligent to come from my mouth. I hope she makes more! It is a wonderful extension to the great work she does on her blog.
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It’s February, which, for me, means getting back to work. (In more ways than one.) I made a conscious decision to not produce online content throughout January. Infact during January I did a number of things that were completely novel for me. I actually went on a holiday. And what really struck me when I reflect upon that holiday is how much I actually wanted to create things. It’s funny because when I compare that with most of 2009, I would be sitting in my little home office scolding myself for not having done enough. I decided to resign from my dayjob and become a serious artist or a serious writer, or a serious… something. That was probably my mistake. I mean – don’t get me wrong, I became very serious indeed. (Some might say neurotic.) But I wasn’t producing very much. And despite my very open schedule I wasn’t having much fun either.
In the process of doing all of this I made myself quite isolated. My life lacks the kind of structure it had when I was working for someone else. I miss the social interaction of my coworkers. I don’t have a lot of friends here locally and – surprise, surprise – most of the time they are working anyway. I love the Internet’s ability to bring people together, people from all around the world. I love that you are not confined by your geographical reality. But even this is a double edged sword. And in some ways the things I love about social media are also the things I hate about it. It seems at times perversely unfair when you find a sincere and heartfelt connection with someone and can’t do something as seemingly straightforward as sit down and have a cup of coffee with them.
When I resigned from my job, I was tired. I was physically exhausted. My work life was consuming my entire life and I was feeling the effects. I knew I needed more balance in my life. But what I did didn’t create more balance. I just swung to the opposite end of the same spectrum. It was reactionary, I suppose, and equally unsatisfying. So that, more than anything in 2010, is what I’m after. Balance.
I seem to always be coming back to Julia Cameron’s work. It just seems to be something I can lean on when I am lost and fearful. She talks in terms of ‘artist dates’ – about making the time to do things you enjoy, to indulge your curiosity, to fill your artistic well. It seemed too easy to me. I didn’t think it would work or help. But in 2010 I’ve noted such a change within myself. There is a certain lightness and optimism that I secretly never thought I would feel again. And I can’t trace it back to any one thing. But, in a funny way, I can trace it back to a lot of things. I can trace it back to watching old television shows that remind me of my childhood – things like Alf and Full House. I can trace it back to that CD of traditional Chinese music that I bought in Sydney’s Chinatown from the musicians themselves who were performing there in the street on a starry night. I can trace it back to finally putting that paintbrush on the canvas and dragging it across the surface just to see what would happen. These are small indulgences that somehow inspire great personal change. They seem to make what had been a lacklustre life somehow shine again. They seem to make me think the world might be a magical place after all.
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