Rumination + Illustration = Illumination

‘You can never postpone your creativity. The more you postpone it, the more you slowly kill it.’

* Kenzo Minami

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”

* Ray Bradbury

Came across this great link to pieces about the virtues of idleness (Quitting the Paint Factory by Mark Slouka), and 6 myths about creativity by Bill Breen. They’re more than 7 years old, but that’s of no importance.

Often, stories of artists’ lives paint them as artists from birth. Their mothers report that they were never without a pencil to scribble with as soon as they could hold one, whether they grew up to be fine artists or writers. It is one of the most enviable qualities in a human, surely, that they knew what they wanted to do with their lives, what they wanted to ‘be’, from such a young age; that they had endless years to pursue and perfect their desires.

All of this is very off-putting to the rest of us.

You never hear about the people who ran through a host of decades without ever picking up a brush or touching a typewriter. Oh, there’s the occasional Mary Wesley type, who gets their first bestseller at 70-odd years old, a source of hope to late bloomers everywhere. But when you get to know a little about these marvels, you discover that they, too, began a neighborhood newspaper — complete with accomplished cartoons — at five; were the leading literary light in their primary school; won the County Art Fair at fourteen; or have been writing daily, or drawing, throughout their lives, but only “for themselves”.

It was this body of myths and legends, I believed, that stopped me - that I allowed to stop me - from becoming any kind of artist. I had mere skirmishes with the creative. I danced through my childhood, acted through my teens, stitched pillows and crafted papier mache bowls in my twenties, and drew exactly four intriguing pencil sketches in my thirties. Now and then I’d read about some lawyer like me who, as in my dreams, quit the law to become a writer.

She would get up at 530 every morning, drink green tea, go for a six mile run, tend her garden, eat an apple and a slice of homemade bread, then settle down to hammer out an entire chapter, with seeming ease, before lunch with her lover. I, lacking any such drive, discipline, focus or infrastructure, would immediately quell the artist hammering at my ribs to get out, and go back to constructing boring legal articles for pointless legal journals.

When I was young, I believed that artists were born, not made. Later, I came to think that artists were made, not born. Either way, I held myself up to these other histories, these impossibly rigid and wholesome daily schedules and self-controls, and felt too inadequate even to begin. I read a mountain of books about how to write without ever writing a word outside the workplace. After a while, it became … what would you call a combination of masturbation and procrastination, psychologically-speaking? Is there a word for that? There should be a word for that. I’ll bet German has one.

But then, at forty, something miraculous occurred. Suddenly, I knew that to be an artist is simply to be a child again, but with keener eyes. You don’t have to run daily to write. You just have to write. And keep writing. Because you want to, for the sheer joy of it. You don’t have to be insane, or French, or a former child savant, to be an artist. You just have to enjoy playing with paper and color, and trust the small voice inside that tells you when to stop. Connect the dots you see in the world, fill the empty spaces. Then, if you want to, throw what you’ve done at the walls of the world outside and see if anything sticks; walls that once you built inside, out of fear.

Writing and reading create silvery threads that connect people through time and space. Someone, somewhere, will think, oh my god! Yes, that, I saw that too. Does it mean anything to make these little connections? It feels like it means something. Only connect, said Forster.’Live in fragments no longer’.

It dawned on me one morning that life itself is an art, and that what works in life works in creation, what works in creation works in life. There are no rules, no permissions. Only some simple truths, the first of which is: get out of your own way, and stop thinking that other lives, other ways of being, somehow have a power stronger than the artist within each of us.

“The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him [or her] — on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire … There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.”

* Carl Jung

Tip for creatives #478:

Always carry a writing implement and paper of some sort.

Catch thought bubbles before they pop.

(IMHO smart phones etc seem to swallow them)

Bring a creative thing from the possibility plane to the material plane. That’s your purpose, as an artist, and as a person.

‘Creativity is like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’

E. L. Doctorow

“Without courage we don’t go very far. In art, as in a life well lived, we’re always stepping into the unknown with confidence. We’re responding to what calls us—that’s why we can trust it and head off on new adventures. We’re not acting alone but together with Spirit. We’re growing in awareness and strength. We may fail; so what? We may be ridiculed or laughed at; who cares? If we choose the safe, predictable path, the one we think we control, we go nowhere new. We never get to be who we are. Courage is trusting that we’re capable of what we’re called to do and taking action, even if we don’t know exactly where it’s going.”

* Cat Bennett, The Confident Creative

Try as I might, I cannot remember what it is to be bored.

Put away writing, or anything else you’ve made, into a drawer, actual or virtual, for a while. Until it becomes separate, other, clear, like memories, like plans. But don’t leave it there for too long, so long that it stops singing. And for heaven’s sake don’t scrape away at your own soul. Get out of your own way. Then create whatever runs through you like blood, like water. Let it get out of you. You are just the pipe. Stop tightening the tap; relax; do. Then wait. Look again. Then share if it needs sharing.

* Things my Muse told me and I listened to only haltingly for a long time.

On my WordPress blog I wrote at some length about the importance of giving out as well as taking in, creatively speaking, and perhaps I’ll repost that here very soon, after some trimming and editing. In the meantime, there’s a good piece on that subject over at 8164.

Thank you for the likes and reblogs. This Tumblr place is so much more communal than WordPress, I feel.

Dusk, October 1988. On a long-haul bus from Adelaide to Alice Springs, hypnotised by stripes of colour flowing past the window. Every few years I would remember them and try to capture them. A dreadful attempt at weaving springs to mind.

1am, January, 2007. A tiny apartment in Daegu, South Korea, a large canvas hanging from a rusty nail in the living room wall; cheap acrylic paints liquifying from the underfloor heating below yellow linoleum. At last it looks about right. First-ever finished painting (if you exclude the masterpieces of infancy).

Near midnight, May 2010, London. I have wondered why ‘becoming an artist’ takes so long. Tonight I realise that I awoke to art somewhere in the Northern Territories, half my life ago, when for some reason my mind processed its view on the world differently than before, in a reductive way and yet with greater clarity.

I’m just taking a good while to find the synergy between pragmatism and creation. I’m still on the journey that started with that bus ride. At least I’m still on it.

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“I cannot tell you how happy I am to have taken up drawing again. I’ve been thinking of it, but I always considered the thing impossible and beyond my reach.”  (From a letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother)

“There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one’s gift to those one loves most … The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.”

* May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude