My friend Michael Meloni started a personal blog recently. I actually read one of his blog entries and found myself thinking, “Oh it would be so cool to have a blog…” And then – of course – it dawned on me that I did have a (much neglected) blog. So yes, here I am.

I don’t want to gush too much but I’ve been going to art lessons for a few months now and I have to say it is one of the best things I’ve ever done. I want to try to unpack some of the benefits I’ve experienced from having a great art teacher.

The Obvious – Technique
A good art teacher will provide you with specific technique relating to your medium. Perhaps it’s about improving what you do already, perhaps it’s about introducing a whole new skill set. You may be surprised at what you can do even with a medium you’ve practiced with for some time. Sometimes it’s just about getting a new perspective.

Philosophies
It’s not just technique that your teacher passes onto you as a student, it is also their philosophies. One of teacher’s favourite sayings is, “The only difference between a good painting and a bad painting is more work.”

The Stuff That’s Not Written In The Books
And then there are those tips and tricks that are garnered through a life time of creating and shared with you the student. Whether it’s cost effective ways of reusing old objects (a stay wet palette made out of a sponge, an icecream lid and some cling wrap?) or when to use industrial hardware over “artist supplies.”

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Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken is familiar to many of us. While I’ve mused over the meaning of this poem elsewhere, today I want to really focus on the part that stays with me. Specifically the last stanza.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

What interests me here isn’t the final line, not even the final three lines, but rather the first two. Frost will share his adventures with someone, he is so matter-of-fact on this point, there’s no doubt in his mind. Perhaps he did this conversationally, certainly he uses a poetic form to share it with his readers. He has such a profound sense of audience.

People need people. Artists need an audience. Sometimes even the whispered possibility of an audience. It is the reason that videos are uploaded to YouTube channels with no subscribers. It is the reason that poetry gets taken from a journal in a bottom drawer and transcribed into blog form. If it’s out there, perhaps someone will find it. Perhaps someone will see it or read it or watch it. Julia Cameron refers to it as being witnessed. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it does it make a sound; moreover, if nobody notices we were here did we actually exist at all?

It’s the reason too when we don’t have someone to talk to face-to-face we blurt things out online.

I was taken aback by how succinctly a handful of tweets summed up so much of my life, how much they embodied things I hadn’t said or was reluctant to say.

*********

I became a writer because I was a frustrated musician. And then I became a visual artist because I was a frustrated writer.

I’ve always loved music but even as a seven year old a part of me genuinely thought, “If I’m a rock star maybe people will love me then.”

But I couldn’t play an instrument, or sing. I studied audio engineering and music business management. I figured I’d be a producer.

Somehow on completing uni it became apparent there were no opportunities for me. I came home to live with my parents and get a dayjob.

And I kept that dayjob for about five years until I was so driven by despair (with a broken heart) that I gave it all away.

And that’s basically the John Lacey story in a nutshell.

*********

Nobody replied, I don’t know if anybody read those tweets. But still I share them there – and here – in the hope that someone bear witness.

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I feel this strange urge to write some sort of Christmas message as I sit here on Christmas Eve watching Monkey Magic of all things… I don’t know that I have any great wisdom to offer, except perhaps the recent realisation that making things for others can be quite a wonderful rewarding thing to do.

Whether it’s making gingerbread cookies…

Or preparing a roast Turkey for your family (something I certainly hadn’t done before) with Nigella’s butter and maple syrup glaze…

Or just giving someone you love something you made with your own hands…

It seems counter-intuitive but you receive things (albeit sometimes intangible things) by giving. You receive pleasure by giving pleasure, you gain connection through giving of yourself. So this holiday season I invite you to give something of yourself to someone else and see what happens.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Holidays, Joyous Kwanzaa… or even just a Happy December.

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It’s 10:44pm Monday night as I type. I’ve been in a weird mood all night. I watched a documentary on sensory deprivation which both fascinated and horrified me. I listened to a podcast (a sermon really) titled “Contemplation and Action.” I sat here playing refrains from songs I had written.

The documentary sort of took Julia Cameron’s idea of the empty well and took it to it’s most disturbing extreme. The podcast made me realise the folly of seeking perfection – spiritual, artistic, personal, otherwise. And the music made me realise I was still sad, still nursing old wounds. And then it all starts feeding back into each of these things. I realise I was reluctant to be sad because I didn’t want to be affected, I wanted to be perfect, I wanted to be untouchable. I wanted to be completely impervious to the criticism and rejection of others. But I’m not. Infact I suspect I might be more sensitive to its effects than most. I feel bad about this and beat myself up even more.

Then I check my email. There’s a message via YouTube. Someone has commented on a video I made some time ago in which I combined chocolate, biscuit and mini marshmallows. I’ve done all kinds of weird and wonderful things on YouTube but I’ll level with you – I had no concept of how deeply controversial my combining of chocolate, biscuit and mini marshmallows was. In my defense I am very open and matter-of-fact about the whole thing. I explain that I just woke up and that I had never combined those ingredients before. But at any rate this video irritates people. They call me names, they tell me an idiot (or worse). Mostly they just tell me that I’m (shudder!) doing it wrong.

This amuses me because, honestly, at the time I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t really care to be honest. I wanted to combine chocolate, biscuit and mini marshmallows and make a video while doing that. So I did. To the extent that I achieved everything I wanted to achieve makes me think this was a raging success. But no apparently I did it wrong! So these complete strangers who happened across my video for no better reason than it is monetized and appears higher in search results for s’mores or chocolate (or something) want to retroactively shame me for doing something I wanted to do… Never mind the fact that I’m being criticised for something as trivial as preparing a snack that was to be consumed by no one but myself.

The good news is that if someone tells you you’re doing it ‘wrong’ it means simply this: you’re doing it. You’re doing that thing you want to do, you’re creating that thing that you want to see exist in this world. That it even exists is a testament to your effort and your vision, to your constant battle to tell an inner critic (and a few outer ones too) to shut the hell up. Because at the end of the day you can look yourself in the eye (with the help of a mirror) and say, “I wrote this song and you know what – no one can take that away from me.”

A former lover made me doubt my self-worth. A sibling informed me that the only way to ‘make it’ in art was to die. I parted ways with an online community I was really hoping to become a valued member of. Random people have left less-than-inspirational feedback on my work. I’ve been depressed. I’ve been unnecessarily self-critical. But somehow I came through all this and I never gave up, I kept on creating, I kept on writing and drawing and composing. Through creating I was able to make sense of the highs and lows of my existence and realign with my own values and aspirations. Through creating I am delivered back to my own hand and not influenced by malevolent bystanders. The danger isn’t ‘doing it wrong’, so much as yielding to criticism and giving up and not doing it at all. So if you’re doing it, congratulations. I hope you keep doing it. I hope you can continue to create and share and that through doing so you become a more fully realised version of yourself.

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I’ve talked previously about how I wanted to paint but didn’t. Something I was perhaps less forthcoming about was that I had told a person, a very specific person, about my desire to paint. Infact painting was one small part of a much larger, more grandiose fantasy I had been concocting in my head. I was going to move to a new city, I was going to work during the day and study art at night and I was going to date that particular person.

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.

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We often the words ‘child’ and ‘children’ used to describe ideas relating to creativity. Your creative projects are, in essence, your ‘brainchildren’ and we are often told about the need of collaborating with our own ‘inner child.’ But perhaps there are other benefits to thinking of our creative projects in this way and articulating the needs of those projects in the way we might to the needs of literal children.

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Sister Wendy Beckett is a bonafide nun with a considerable knowledge of and contagious enthusiasm for art. I recently had the delightful opportunity to watch her documentary, The Story Of Painting. One of the things that really struck me the first time I watched it was an early scene in which she visits some early cave paintings and muses over the nature of art.

Sister Wendy:

And so you see, scientifically these are primitive people. Because science advances. It’s like a ladder – one step leads to another, but art isn’t like that. Art is about being human. Children make art instinctively. Archeologists know when they find evidence of art they’ve found evidence of human beings. It expresses all that is best in us. Our desires, our hopes, our truth. And so art changes, but it doesn’t get better.

I’ve devoted so much space – in this blog and in my head – lately to the idea of Ira Glass’ gap and about wanting to develop technique and my own ill feelings about my limitations as a painter and writer, but there is something about this idea that rings true.

Certainly our forms and techniques may vary and evolve over time but art – that fundamental human desire to express one’s self – remains constant.

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It’s one thing to discover you’re in ‘the gap’, and yet another to realise the honeymoon is over. What’s the solution when you’re taking two steps forward and three back?

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We entertained Ira Glass’s ideas about Good Taste and The Gap recently. The gap is, frankly, a pretty sucky place to be and the only way past it is through it. But I wanted to talk about another phase that I have detected in my own creative endeavours and that’s the honeymoon period. You don’t really know what you’re doing, you don’t have technique, you might not even know much about what you’re trying to do. And yet in this stage everything seems so fun and exciting, and remarkably sometimes you have moments of sheer dumb luck in which you create something magical. But what happens when you move out of the honeymoon period?

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Sometimes I take inspiration from nature.
I wonder what nature takes inspiration from…?

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I was having one of those days when everything that could go wrong did. Even attempting to write about my woes in blogform didn’t seem to help. Eventually I decided I was going crazy and needed to get out of the house. So I did. There’s an area of bushland near my house and I like to walk around there sometimes. There are steps heading down the cliff fashioned out of sandstone. I made my way down one of these sets of stairs. I suddenly realised I wasn’t alone, I could hear something – but what?

There in front of me were not one but two Lyrebirds. Majestic brownly coloured birds renowned for their ability to mimick sounds. Clearly these birds took inspiration from everything – from machinery, from other birds, whatever they could hear was fair game!

We all seek originality, we all want a voice and an expression that is somehow uniquely ours. But we have to appreciate that we are in some ways small continuances in much larger artistic traditions and within humanity itself. And it’s not like fellow travelers were staring and pointing and shouting, “What derivative nonsense!” The performance was astounding, the tribute compelling, the technique hard to imagine… and what other animal would’ve had the creativity to showcase and juxtapose such a collection of sounds?!

What do you take inspiration from?

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Documentary maker Ken Burns:

And the second thing is you have to persevere, particularly in documentary film. If you wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or a feature film I could tell you the steps to take to do that, but every working documentary filmmaker I know has gotten there through their own unique path. There is no career path. That’s the good news and the terrifying bad news. There is no career path and you’re alone and you just sort of have to bring something to it and what I think it is among many other qualities is a kind of perseverance. It’s keeping and collecting those hundreds of hundreds of rejections for your first film as a reminder that you know you may not have… you may not be the most talented person. You may not have the best ideas, but you’re going to see this through and I’m sure there are lots of great filmmakers or people that would have been great filmmakers had they been able to follow through that had ideas much more interesting than mine, but didn’t and therefore aren’t filmmakers and we don’t know what they are because they didn’t have that ability to persevere against the inevitable problems, the inevitable friction that attends any effort to create something new.

From Big Think.

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