The World In All Its Brilliance

// February 2nd, 2010 // 7 Comments » // chagall, creativity, curiosity

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In Paris I went to neither the art academy nor to the professors. The city itself was my teacher, in all things, in every minute of the day. The market folk, the waiters, the hotel porters, the farmers, the workers. They were enveloped in something of that astounding atmosphere of enlightened freedom that I had never come across anywhere else.

Marc Chagall

Do you ever have moments where the veil just falls away and the world as it is right now presents itself fresh and new?

My wife and I were out doing errands the other day and pulled up at a stoplight outside a cafe. A woman on a bicycle was propped beside our car waiting for the light to change. A couple walked, arms linked, in front of the stopped traffic. In the cafe every table was occupied, at least those visible from the street, and on each table there was at least one laptop open. One man looked through the window, checking out the woman on the bike.

I was struck by how particular this scene was to this moment, to this corner of the city, to the people present, and the activities they were doing. It was a grey Seattle day which threw a soft light over everything, and beneath the bustle of activity everyone seemed relaxed. Things moved in slow motion.

That moment will never be repeated exactly again.

Well it’s Seattle, so the clouds will probably be repeated. Never in that exact same way, though.

The woman on the bike will never lean in just that way, in just that spot, watched by just those eyes as she waits for the light to change. The relationship between the couple crossing the road will never be quite the same again. Tomorrow it may be deeper, or fonder, more fraught, or finished.

The man looking out the window might never see the woman bike-rider again. Or he may see her tomorrow, run down the road and ask her out. In a few weeks someone might even sit in the cafe reading their favourite blogs on an ipad instead of a laptop.

The light changed and we drove off. The moment of seeing, of really seeing that little scene, dropped away and a veil slipped back over the world.

I don’t remember much at all of the rest of the trip. I was caught up in my own thoughts–or conversation–for most of it. We probably stopped at a few more lights at which nothing really caught my eye, and soon enough we were home again.

But that small moment outside the cafe stays with me. It was just a plain moment, but bright in its plainness.

I read recently that when visitors came to Chagall’s studio they had to wait for him to throw on a pair of pants, because he painted naked. That nakedness shines through in his paintings, too.

I love this gesture of casting away what stood between him and his canvas.

Brief moments where I see the world clearly make me realise how muffled my view usually is. It makes me wonder if sometimes I walk around like a guy wearing a pair of pants over my head.

I’m not sure we’re even built to see the world in all its brilliance all the time. I’m sure we gather that mental clothing around us in self-protection, but I’m also pretty sure I go through life a little overdressed.

One payoff that comes from building a creative practice is that the discipline in showing up regularly to create ensures we’ll hit roadblocks and stop signs that occasionally strip away our mental clothing, forcing us to see things as they really are, if only for that brief moment as we scramble to throw our pants back on.

5 Unhelpful Questions For Your New Creative Project

// January 26th, 2010 // 8 Comments » // Uncategorized, creativity, curiosity

At the start of a new creative project do you ever find yourself facing down a barrage of shaky thoughts designed to prevent you from even beginning?

I certainly do. Sometimes the starting line can feel like the finishing line where, just as one last burst of energy is required to break the tape at the end of the race, a similar burst of energy is often required just to break self imposed barriers at the start of a creative journey.

These barriers often appear as questions, which is a big clue: it’s almost as if they’re designed to divert me from creative action and send me elsewhere looking for the magic answer that will make things go smoothly.

Here is a small selection of those questions from my head:

1. Do I Have Everything I Need?

Possibly the sneakiest question, and often the first to come up for me.

Here’s where the part of me that’s scared to create offers to ‘help’ by planting a doubtful seed which gives the option of ‘preparing’ rather than ‘creating’.

It’s sneaky, because sometimes we do need to gather a few things, research, prepare ourselves before we sit down to create.

But more often we need to just sit down and write/draw/sing/strum/move–whatever the action is that moves us into our creative project.

And if we don’t have everything we need? I’m often surprised when caught without my note book or preferred art supplies at how innovative I can be on the spot.

I’ve written snatches of poetry on napkins, sketched with coffee and fingers, made impromptu toys for my sons with cardboard boxes, formula tins. I’ve seen amazing Aboriginal cave art in Australia that was accomplished with sticks, spit, and crushed rock.

2. OMG! Where Did I Put The Map?

That fearful part really wants you to lay the path out exactly, wants to know where this is all leading. Because if the distance from point A to point B is comprehensively mapped out and all the dragons are banished to the edge of the page then nothing scary (ie: creative) can happen.

True creativity is always about discovering something new, no matter how incremental that discovery may be. If that newness is missing, then nothing has been created.

Needing to know the exact layout of the terrain means eliminating any risk of tripping over the unknown. Safe, but definitely not creative.

I think this is why planning, or having an exhaustive outline for a creative project is so tempting–it gives a sense of security. But writing an outline or hanging onto a predetermined plan for your project shuts out opportunities for new learning and creative growth.

It’s O.K. to have a sense of where you might want to go, but more important than that is a willingness to go where the creative project asks you to go.

If you’re surprised and thrilled by where your art takes you, then your reader/viewer/listener is more likely to feel surprised and thrilled too.

3. Can I Do It As Well As They Did?

If I listened to that one every time it came up I’d be a grown man sitting in a crib. Unfortunately, I’ve listened a lot. It’s a pointless question, comparison is not the point of creativity. Creativity is.

The best antidote I’ve ever seen for this question was reading a Gary Larson collection (the ‘Far Side’ cartoonist) that had a brief history of his cartooning career. He showed some of his first cartoons that ran in local newspapers way before he took off. The drawings were crude and a bit amateurish, but you could see the seeds of his unique style and great sense of humour in them already.

The important thing wasn’t whether his cartoons were as skillful as a Charles Schulz, or as funny as Bill Watterson, it was whether or not he was creating his own unique viewpoint and style, at whatever level he was at, which is what eventually made his work seem so effortlessly brilliant.

4. Will Everybody Like It?

It’s the most natural thing in the world to want everybody to like something that’s important to you. You’re bravely putting yourself out there in an art-form you’ve come to love and want to work at.

But this is entirely the wrong question to be asking at the start of the process. Probably in the middle and end too, but especially at the beginning. It’s like setting the handbrake, bricking your wheels and slashing your tyres all at once. You’re guaranteed a fast trip nowhere.

I used to post a lot of poems up on poetry critiquing sites, I liked it when the poems got a good reception, but I always learned more when people let me know what didn’t work.

The best response I ever got was when a whole lot of people loved a poem I had posted and another significant group absolutely hated it. To me, the fact that people were strongly engaged with the poem, some of them to the point of being pissed off, was more important than what they thought of it.

5. Will It Be Perfect?

Um, no.

This question is rarely asked via an actual ‘voice’ in my head. It’s more of a visceral question in the form of a general unease, because I know it won’t be perfect and imagine all sorts of consequences: shame, ridicule, low grades, loss of status.

Of course it won’t be perfect. And that’s a good thing. If everything I created was perfect, creating art would be a sterile experience not worth pursuing.

Not only will my creation not be perfect, It’s pretty well destined to fail, at least partially. That’s a good thing too. Failure is the Vitamin F of creativity, it’s good for your heart and your eye, your bones and your soul.

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All of these questions seem to have my best intentions at heart, and in their own way they do. Taking creative action means putting myself out there, and I find that scary. At some level I want to be protected from that.

At the same time I want to be vigilant in keeping focus and diving in as deep as I can when I create. And that involves letting go of any expectations I might have for the end result.

Mild Flooding, Water Wings Are Located Beneath Your Seats.

// January 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

When The Head Rolls Away The Body Rises

// January 3rd, 2010 // 8 Comments » // creativity

As you read this, does your head feel heavy on your shoulders? The head makes up about 5-15% of our body weight, but can feel as if it weighs more.

When creating I often feel the pull to rush upstairs and try to think my way through a project. Sometimes it works too, even if the end result feels a little shoe-horned into being. My head is loud and busy with ideas and opinions on what should be done. Maybe not the greatest ideas or the most shining opinions, but very insistent.

This insistence adds to the physical weight of the head, I’m sure.

When I tune into my body I can sometimes feel the tension rising from the neck as it tries to hold the head up, the compression in my throat as the weight bears down, the forward slump of my frame.

Joanna Macy, in ‘World as Lover, World As Self’, says that we often walk through life as we were a “head on a stick”. To live out our lives within the confines of our skull is  a way of being that is pretty well accepted. The question: “Are you out of your mind?” is pretty telling as a measure of someone’s sanity.

I used to be a member of a Playback Theatre group and every Tuesday night we would meet for rehearsals. Playback theatre is a form of improvised theatre in which audience members stories are played back by the actors. The bulk of the rehearsals were devoted to going into our bodies and working from there.

Training ourselves to move from the feeling body rather than the thinking head was the only way to tap into the intuitive nature of working as an ensemble.

Six different heads all trying to impose their ideas at once would never work. Once you were on-stage and an audience member was telling their story to the conductor, the worst possible thing you could do as an actor was to try and ‘think’ your way through to how you would tell the story.

Instead, we got to be continually amazed at what came up through the wisdom of our  ’collective body’.

Often a performance would begin with a snatch of improvised music from the musician who was a part of the group, and we would respond with a movement. Whatever movement seemed appropriate. From there the performance would almost create itself. More importantly, the performance would often be a revelation to the performers, the audience, and the story-teller whose story was being played back.

One of the most transforming things I got from my Playback Theatre experience was a deep respect for the creative abilities of my own body, and the relief that came from knowing that.

Douglas Harding wrote a book called ‘On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious”

The whole book is great, but the insight in the opening few pages is all he really needed to write. He talks about the day he ‘realized’ that he didn’t actually have a head.

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

I think that’s the best description ever of the relief that can be had from dropping the weight of the head. Do I have a head? Actually, I think I do. But I agree with Harding that when your head sometimes seems to have the weight of an iron ball it can be sweet to just let it go and allow the world to come forward.

There are many ways to create from the body, even in seemingly sedate forms of art. William Wordsworth wrote and revised many of his poems while on long walks, Wallace Stevens composed his poetry while walking the two miles to and from his work  each day. In the world of art the physicality of Jackson Pollock’s painting stands out as an example of letting the head make way for the body’s intelligence to come through.

Here are some things I’ve tried that help me get more into my body:

Mindful bath: I was taught to do this at a stressful time in my life when I suffered from a particularly busy mind. Basically it involved getting into a bath, grabbing some soap and washing myself from the feet up, naming each part of the body as I washed it: “These are  my toes, here is my ankle, … and so on. The combination of being immersed in a warm bath while trying to be mindfully aware of my body is a really powerful exercise.

Writing/drawing with the non-dominant hand: the sheer unfamiliarity this act is enough to bring my awareness down into my hand as I draw or write. Trying out a different way of moving, a new kind of dance for example, also helps to bring me out of an unconscious way of moving to a more aware state.

Juggling: is a great way to get out of the head, I like to do this at the point when I’ve been thinking something over for a long time and just need to wipe the mental slate clean. If you don’t juggle, a mini trampoline also works really well.

Play with sidewalk chalk: I learned the value of this by drawing on our driveway with my son. I like to make huge sweeping lines as I draw, there’s just something really freeing and physically dynamic that really drops me into my body. It’s like a ‘dry’ version of Jackson Pollock style art.

You might like to try some of these (let me know how you go). I bet you have some great ways to bring your awareness into the body and create from there too, I’d love to hear them.

I’ve signed up for  the ‘Creative Every Day’ challenge for 2010. The topic for the month is ‘Body’ So I thought it would be fun to write a blog post each week on the monthly theme. Here’s where you can learn more, and sign up to join the challenge if you like:

http://creativeeveryday.com/creative-every-day-challenge

The Pyjama-Clad Dragon Slayer

// December 22nd, 2009 // 3 Comments » // creativity, curiosity, poetry, reading

Illustration Friday: Hatch

// December 11th, 2009 // 6 Comments » // illustration friday