A little scared, but what the heck...

Should we press on when creativity feels hard?

Hello! How are you today? Before todays piece I just wanted to offer you the opportunity to read another piece from me. My short lyric essay Shoah Shoes appears in the Spring Issue of Vita Poetica along side some fine work by other writers you may like to be introduced to.

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I watched an art video this week in which a breezy blonde purported to show how her creative process worked. The video, with its tinkling musical soundtrack, showed her floating through sun dappled meadows, pausing to gaze at a butterfly, a blossom laden branch, a bright bloom. Back in the studio she twirled a perfectly flat fern over a pristine sketchbook and began a flawless botanical sketch which, apparently, by dint of the two seconds she was seen at a computer screen on a suspiciously tidy desk, would be easily transformed into a whole career in pattern design.

I also spent time this week looking at the websites of several installation artists, recommended to me by an art mentor as inspirational fodder for a tentative project. On the crisp white webpages were presented perfectly focused images of impressive installations in empty rooms. The About pages were sparse lists of degrees, exhibitions, publications - a model of clean professionalism. Any suggestion that the work did not appear fully formed and complete, dropped by a stork into a white cube gallery, was totally absent.

Let me tell you, neither of these is how I experience the process of art making, much though I might wish it were. There are no meadow strolls but there are mornings sitting in a dressing gown eating crumpets bemoaning to my husband, my journal, a pot plant, that I have no ideas, nothing to say and no one to say it to anyway and even if I did, I don’t have the art skills to say it visually. This will go on for many days through many packets of biscuits and cups of tea, though many jealous hours of watching other artists in flower filled fields. Then, at an inopportune, random time an idea will strike.

I say strike because it thunders down from the World Above and will be as heavy and weighty as a meteor. No wafty ferns here. There will be an Idea of Import, a conceptual theme that deserves serious investigation, and I will pour it out to the husband and the pot plenty both of which will wilt under the onslaught. The journal has more fortitude and will accept pages of mind mapped notes, the outward representation of the fireworks exploding in my head. The possibility will weaken me, and more biscuits will be needed. The day will end in great certainty and determination. Maybe even a premature declaration to another artist or if I am very over-sugared up, on the Internet.  Should this process be videoed, the soundtrack would be the chugging voice of the train in Watty Piper’s old children book The Little Engine That Could:  I think I can, I think I can, I think I can….

The next morning, in lieu of fresh sketchbook pages, I substitute blankness of mind and a freshly laundered hotel-white dressing gown. What was I thinking? It’s a fine idea but what could I possibly do with it? The meteor has left a hole in my confidence the size of a small village and now the video would show me staring into the abyss, panicked, lost, disconnected and desperate to figure out how to make something - anything – of import. Anyone passing who dares suggest the simplicity of “just for goodness’ sake get over yourself, sit down and enjoy drawing a fern” gets shoved into the hole because, well, why do that when you can struggle with existential fear and grandiose ambition?

 Now there is a more complex soundtrack: On the top:

            I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…

Underneath the added heavy base beat:

Who you kiddin’? Who you kiddin’? Who you kiddin’?...

And over the top, from experience, bloody mindedness and some sort of fundamental incapacity to do the easy thing and give in, lies a desperate doggerel which we will, to preserve an ounce of my dignity, claim is a rap beat:

I feel so down

But I know I can find

A way to get out there what’s on my mind

Just gotta keep exploring

Keep outpouring

Trust the Muse,

Learn the skills

Get out of your ****ing

Dressing gown.

The video of my process would then cut to an artist fully dressed in a paint splattered shirt and old, too-many times washed jeans, in a paint splattered studio, splattering paint on already paint splattered play canvases and muttering about the essential place play and the splattering of paint has in the development of creative ideas. (Art critics say all kinds of things about what Jackson Pollock was up to but sometimes, I wonder)

Image by Bilge Can Gürer from Pixabay

Hours later I will have made a giant disappointing mess. The studio will be a devastation zone of paint encrusted tools and spilled water (of both the tap and tears version). I will however, usually come out with a small degree of progress. I might have narrowed down a colour theme, might have made one mark I like, might have made one mark I hate and will decide has no part in my project. I will have listened to one song on repeat over and over for three and half hours until there is something in it that lays down, gritty and gripping in my soul. This week:

Put on my jeans my favourite shirt,

Pull up my boots and hit the dirt

Finally doing something I’ve dreamed of for years

Don't know quite what to expect
A little scared, but what the heck
My desire is always greater than my fear

Big dreams and faded jeans
Fit together like a team
Always busting at the seams
Big dreams and faded jeans

…. May the stars that fill my eyes
Guide my path and be my light
And may God provide the means
To accomplish my big dreams, my big dreams

Big dreams and faded jeans

            Songwriters: Dolly Parton

Big Dreams and Faded Jeans lyrics © Song-a-billy Music

I still won’t have a grasp on what I am doing or any real confidence in my ability to do whatever it is that I don’t know I am supposed to be doing. So, I’ll rinse and repeat. At some point I’ll start to make something, and it will be rubbish and I will put it in the bin. I’ll look at lots of other art and try to figure out how the heck it was done and all the time I’ll be sitting under a dark cloud of not knowing.

What I will do in between all this is write, because writing I can do. Writing is a flowing pleasure of instinct mixed with known skills. Not knowing what I have to say with writing is no problem at all because it goes away as soon as I put my fingers to the keyboard. It’s the inside equivalent of walking in a meadow. Sure, it gets a bit muddy or cold some days but it’s still a flat easy walk not an uphill slog on snow driven scree. I read a lot of newsletters where people say that writing is a hard activity for them, and I don’t experience it that way at all. But I know the feeling because art is hard. Really, really hard.

So why don’t I give the art up and just follow the process and medium that is natural to me? Good question. At this point in working on the New Big Ambitious Art idea I am beginning to think that’s exactly what I should do, that creativity is not actually meant to be hard, that flow is the point and why push against a stiff, stuck door when there’s an open archway ready to walk though?

I wonder whether I confuse an interest in and appreciation for visual art with a drive to actually do it when that’s not my primary talent. I hear the unwelcome echoes of pressure and demands from my old law job, the belief that if it’s not hard and you are not working fast then you are not pulling your weight. I also hear loud and clear the myth that art must be for exhibition or sale and that a slow, gradual private endeavour is a mere ‘hobby’ to be slightly pitied. (That last message I assign to that bully-boy base track of nonsense because I don’t believe it applies to a single person in the world except me. But I hear it loud and clear anyway.)

I know that giving things up is hard but necessary. That giving things up that we are close to is especially hard. Close in the sense of being fond of and close in the sense of almost having made it, but not quite. There is potentially an element of sunk costs affecting my decision making. Cost of time, of money and of the identity I have been forming around the art. I know that the most important things we can give up sometimes are ones that most closely mask what we are really meant to be doing. Sometimes things come to an end, and we need to move on.

I also know that sticking with things is hard but valuable, that just over the hill can be the widest vista. I know that there is deep satisfaction in digging in and overcoming challenges. I know that what I was writing when I was 16 is not what I write now and that the paint splatters I make now might not be the last level I can get to if I persevere. Some people will be more easily reached, some stories more impactfully told in a non-verbal form. I have recollections of blissfully happy days making art, even if I am not in those days right now.

Despite all this – because of all this in fact – I am becoming ever more interested in the use of the small but powerful word and.  I am interested in how we can combine disparate ideas and facts to form a new better whole, I am interested in continuing my conflict resolution skills into new forms in the creative world. I am drawn to explore ideas of juxtaposition and transitions, combination and transformation.

At the moment, I am immersed in reading and writing essays that combine disparate topics – my efforts this week puts a 12^th century castle in the Yorkshire Dales built by King Arthur’s father next to the icon-hood of Nelson Mandela. I don’t mind sending them to literary magazines with tiny readerships. In fact, I’d write them if only my husband and the pot plant read them. Small, personal, domestic is fine. And I am anxious to help the whole world to understand that it can be true that Jews have a right to live free of persecution in a place they feel at home and say that Gazans have a right to live free of fear and famine in a place they feel at home. You can say that the attacks on the kibbutzim were unconscionably barbaric and criticise the starving of children and the wholesale destruction of their homes. You can condemn action andunderstand the motivation and historical context for those actions. Picking a side is not a requirement. Working to bridge the ‘space between’ is. I believe this is a message applicable to so many other conflicts and worthy of big gallery space. Two different experiences and attitudes to creation, one easy one decidedly not.

What happens on the outside for artists also happens on the inside. And vice versa. We need to learn to say and. We are all made of many parts. Or. As Walt Whitman put it, we are multitudes. My writer part is very old and experienced. (Yesterday my Mother we telling me about a teacher praising something I wrote aged 5, of which I have no recollection.) My artist part is, however, a teenager and is behaving like one with its desire to sit in a bedroom behind closed curtains. I know that as humans we thrive on differences and having something in life that is a challenge alongside something that flows easily is not necessarily a bad thing. I can see that the way I make art and the way I am now writing have a throughline, a common process of taking bits and making a whole. I am interested in combining the two.

Art - in all forms - mirrors life. We need to learn to say and to all the parts of us.  There are no bad ones. None of them are undeserving of expression. How that will work, for me with these two forms of expression I don’t yet know. It might be in seasons, time and time about. It might be a major and a minor. Professional and (gulp) hobby. It could be private and public, active and retired, fast and slow. It could be art and words together in a book or art and words on the same wall. The parts do not necessarily have the same needs or the same way of showing up in my life, in the world, no matter how I unwittingly try to dress them up the same.

What I do know is that I don’t want to have the kind of future that misleads those behind me. I don’t want to have the edited soft-lens presentation or the sparse perfect portfolio that removes the struggles and questions. I want to be here at the coal face, learning and discussing, calling it how it is and leaving breadcrumb trails to others coming along others can see. Paying forward the helpful stories others give me in that regard. I want one or two readers to be able to recognise themselves in my experiences, for them to be able to think: “oh, that’s how it might be for me, oh this dilemma I have is normal, oh, here are ways of thinking that might help me make my life too.”

If all I have to say today is, this is what it feels like to feel you have nothing at all to say, and it’s not so bad and it isn’t actually a bar to creating something new, then that is what I shall say.

Shalom,

Helen

PS. You can’t make this stuff up. I drafted this and went for a cuppa before returning to proof read. I found that the latest copy of the Cambridge Alumni magazine had arrived. Flicking through it from back to front I found first an article about academic and cricketer Mike Brearley. His new book Turning the Pebbles deals with captaining ourselves, allowing all parts of us to play to their best. Then there was an article about the vital importance of storytelling to society. Finally came an article about the Kettles Yard project which loans art to students and the impact such loans had on them.