John Lacey » Julia Cameron

I Shall Be Telling This With A Sigh

John Lacey — Thu, 05 May 2011 13:38:23 +0000

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.

Quality/Quantity - Where To Put Your Focus

John Lacey — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 12:17:20 +0000

I distinctly recall reading something in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way about concentrating on the quantity and leaving the ‘quality’ to God. Well today I’ve been doing that. The quality is fairly uninspiring but there’s something nice – even comforting – about about just churning things out and seeing what happens. And it gives me an opportunity to real play with my materials.

Today I’ve been using Watercolor Postcards and Derwent Inktense water soluble pencils.

Assorted Postcards

There’s something quite liberating about drawing on surfaces as small as postcards. You can do a lot of them in a short period of time. If the one you’re working on doesn’t work out, move on to another.

Fear Of Abandoment

John Lacey — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 23:16:07 +0000

Well one of my new year’s resolutions came to past, I found my copy of The Artist’s Way. (It was hiding in a enclosed compartment on my bookshelf.) I know I talk about this book a lot but it is like a personal oracle to me. I can open to any page at random and find something that seems to help. Yesterday I came to a section on fear.

Julia Cameron writes:

Fear is the true name for what ails the blocked artist. It may be fear of failure or fear of success. Most frequently, it is fear of abandonment. This fear has roots in childhood reality. Most blocked artists tried to become artists against either their parents’ good wishes or their parents’ good judgment. For a youngster this is quite a conflict. To go squarely against your parents’ values means you’d better know what you’re doing. You’d better not just be an artist. You better be a great artist if you’re going to hurt your parents so much….

I want to hesitate for a moment to say that (as far as I am aware) my parents are mostly supportive of my various endeavours. But I have always had this sense that I am going against the grain. And that sense has often made me really driven, hopeful that if I’m brilliant in one area of life perhaps it will make up for my limitations in other parts.

But… it means I need a lot of support and feedback and encouragement. I tend to assume if I don’t get positive feedback that the work is terrible. [And there's clearly a difference between getting negative feedback and getting no feedback.] I constantly feel like the only way I can justify doing anything is to do it perfectly – which is difficult enough for seasoned artists, let alone the humble beginner I am.

Creative Bribes - Sometimes The End Justifies The Means...

John Lacey — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 01:03:56 +0000

In The Right To Write Julia Cameron describes them as ‘cheap tricks.’ She writes:

Tired as we may be of hearing about our “inner children,” I do know that the part of me that writes is young, vulnerable, and easily swayed. My writer can be easily discouraged, as today, by someone’s passing comment. Conversely, my writer can be easily cheered, encouraged, even bribed. I use a lot of cheap tricks to bribe my writer into production. For example, I have multiple “writing stations” scattered throughout my house and, for that matter, my town.

I’m sure people who have done NaNoWriMo will appreciate the truth of this piece of wisdom.

I was amused and impressed to see a great example of this. My friend PretentiousDave decided to reward himself with a mince pie for every 300 words he completed on a university essay. (Though I’m told this was later reworked to happen after every 1000 words.)

What ways do you use to bribe your inner creative?

Clarity Through Creation

John Lacey — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:16:57 +0000

I feel like I’ve reverted as a human being. I thought I had accepted something about myself but in truth I just resigned myself to it. There seemed to be something fundamentally inescapable about it. Certainly I didn’t feel good about it.

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.

Cleaning Up, Clearing Out

John Lacey — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:07:38 +0000

Today I am cleaning up. I am taking stock – in the most literal sense. I’ve concluded I have enough stationery supplies to last several lifetimes. I’ll have to reign myself in the next time I swing by OfficeWorks…

One of the things I came across in my travels was a book full of morning pages from earlier in the year. It’s funny I’ve never been the kind of person to keep a diary. The idea of recording the minutiae of my every day existence seems like an exercise in tedium (for the writer) that would lead to boredom (for the reader). But I am impressed by the contents of the morning pages I discovered because they’re not mindless lists of mundane tasks so much as explorations of my own most inner thoughts. I joke sometimes that I don’t know what I think until I’ve written it done and read it back, but an element of that is true. You need an opportunity to reflect and sometimes you reflect on the page. That’s the point of the exercise.

Clearly there’s a difference between ‘filling the well’ and filling the space. Part of my current efforts are really about cutting back on the things I own, trying to get back to a functional minimalism. Although I am enjoying painting I am sort of running out of space and am wondering how (and where) to store completed canvases and canvas boards. I’ve sort of stacked them together but even this is problematic since they haven’t been sprayed with fixative agent. (Some of the canvas boards – especially those with sculptural elements or dense layers of paint – can actually stick together, ocassionally ruining one or more pieces of work.) I feel like I need more room to work on my art but I have no idea where or how to arrange that either.

I’m trying to add some individual pieces of flair to the room too. I drink a lot of loose leaf jasmine green tea and the tins the tea come in are absolutely beautiful. I decided to use one to hold some of my ever growing collection of pencils. I also got a notebook printed up with a picture of a sea bird (that I had taken some years ago) on it. Sometimes it’s the small but personally meaningful things that help you take pride in your work.

Julia Cameron on ‘Real’ Writers

John Lacey — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:31:52 +0000

Earlier this week my Amazon shipment arrived including The Right To Write: An Invitation and Initiation Into The Writing Life by Julia Cameron. I haven’t had a chance to delve deeply into the book (and many of the tools described are quite similar to solutions offered in The Artist’s Way), however I wanted to share an extract here since it follows on so nicely from this week’s Creative Concepts podcast.

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.

The Things We Don’t Mention

John Lacey — Mon, 24 May 2010 09:30:54 +0000

In The Artist’s Way Julia Cameron writes:

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?

Telling Secrets

John Lacey — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 13:26:10 +0000

I like to keep this blog as upbeat and positive as is possible but the truth is it isn’t always fun and games when it comes to art or life more generally. Somehow actually creating art gave way to not creating art and feeling very irritable and anxious. I’m sure I quote Julia Cameron too often on this blog, but since I couldn’t have said it any better myself…

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes:

Making a piece of art may feel a lot like telling a family secret. Secret telling, by its very nature, involves shame and fear. It asks the question “What will they think of me once they know this?” This is a frightening question, particularly if we have ever been made to feel ashamed for our curiosities and explorations – social, sexual, spiritual.

My art practice involves too many secrets. Things I don’t want to share with anyone, things I don’t even want to admit to myself. Even bringing myself to admit that I wanted to paint in the first instance took over a year. It’s one of the greatest ironies of my existence that while anyone who knows my name can throw it into a search engine and see everything I create and share online I am incredibly guarded with people I know in (quote-unquote) ‘real life.’

There have been breakdowns and breakthroughs this weekend though. I went for a walk through the escarpment, listening to Tori Amos. Listening to the Dakota Version of Hey Jupiter and really reflecting upon what that song meant gave me a way of accessing my own unarticulated sorrow. When I returned from my walk I wrote a poem, my first poem in probably seven years. I also, somewhat mysteriously, ‘found’ some lyrics to a song I wrote back in 2000. It seemed I was able to express things that I hadn’t been able to before. But looking back at them, realising they were fundamentally what I wanted and needed to say, I wasn’t sure I was yet prepared to let those sentiments see the light of day. It’s this underlying tension in so much of what I do. I see it in my painting too – in the subjects I choose to paint, the way in which I choose to paint them – sometimes I’m sure they reveal more than I intend them to.

It’s a terrible thing to spend so much time talking about cultivating a self to ‘express’ and then being fearful when you do. But in a lot of ways I have to exist in a world that doesn’t appreciate most of what I do, that doesn’t understand who I am, that is keen to criticise my rather fragile ego. I’m not sure I want to feel so exposed and vulnerable.

Amusingly the poem I wrote this weekend was about not feeling brave enough to write a poem. When I realised this was indeed what I had done, I laughed and felt strangely accomplished. Where there’s life, there’s hope.

[Mary made the observation that it had been some weeks since I last posted a video here. I do have one which I will post this week though I can't guarantee how regularly they will appear after that. There is some stuff (cryptic enough?) happening to this website behind the scenes that will ultimately make the site more enjoyable to the people who visit it but in the meanwhile I have to play catch up and work on some special secret projects. Watch this space!]

ISBW Does The Artist’s Way

John Lacey — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:15:37 +0000

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.

John Lacey » Julia Cameron

I Shall Be Telling This With A Sigh

Related Posts:

Quality/Quantity - Where To Put Your Focus

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Fear Of Abandoment

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Creative Bribes - Sometimes The End Justifies The Means...

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Clarity Through Creation

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Cleaning Up, Clearing Out

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Julia Cameron on ‘Real’ Writers

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The Things We Don’t Mention

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Telling Secrets

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ISBW Does The Artist’s Way

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