It’s one of those open-air workshops on a crisp spring day. The fields and wood-groves are studded with painters, right down to the water’s edge. Here and there, respecting each other’s space — men with big hats and French easels; women, in pairs, hunched down in the grass. Some are very much alone and aloof. A woman gives me a frown as I approach.
Plodding through the New York Times Sunday crossword is a tiny perfect illustration of the notion that the only way to get better at anything is to keep going. Like a dancer in cement shoes, I tinker in a blind trust that the answers will come in a bolt of inspiration, my ineptitude crumbling away, mid-jeté. “Inspiration,” wrote Elizabeth Gilbert, “needs to find you working.”
Dear Artist, Yesterday morning, Denise called at my studio. Denise is a “vest-pocket” dealer —…
Last Sunday, in a shock of re-entry, two visitors came to the studio — the first in six weeks. They arrived at the door wearing masks, and we introduced ourselves for the first time with what felt like both a momentous and unsatisfying wave, from six-feet apart. I resisted the urge to embrace them properly. I did my best to show them what their presence meant to me. My visitors seemed weary of the protocol and sat down amongst the paintings I’d been working on at my new, yogi-like pace. We discussed the immediate future of the art world before talking about painting. Our visit was tinged with a calm and realism about the unknowns that face our special ecosystem. After an hour, we thanked each other and they got into their cars and drove away.
Dear Artist, There are lots of reasons to paint. This morning’s inbox included about a…
Dear Artist, Beneath a cloud of awareness that people are suffering because of COVID-19, artists…
Ever since I was a kid I’ve been interested in the nature of creative thinking. Where does it come from? Can it be learned? Can it be taught? I’ve been curious about my own periods of creative intuition and creative ineptitude. I’ve also been interested in the difference between “wild child” creativity and mature creative self-management.
Most of our creativity takes place in the right back corner of our brains. In addition, many folks are able to toss the creative ball both fore and aft and port and starboard.
While taking a turn in the garden yesterday, I discovered the tiny, pricked egg of a song sparrow in the grass. Too small to have been made by the chick, the pinhole must have come from another, predator bird in search of a smoothie. “Hopefully his siblings had success,” said a friend, when I sent her the image. With all of us in our individual rooms, the now all-day polyphony of happy birds in the garden tells me she’s right.
Some artists report periods of general anxiety that come and go during their careers. The condition may include heart palpitations, sleeplessness, panic attacks, depression and feelings of inadequacy. While some of these are just part of living, they can also be brought on by the insecure and sometimes difficult nature of the artist’s life. There’s that nagging fear that work is not coming up to expectations. There can be fear of change as well as fear of stagnation. Fact is that shadowy fears and tensions can block creativity, interfere with productivity, and drag down quality.
A childhood friend messaged, “How’s your creative process doing at this time?” I replied that I hadn’t heard a single complaint from an artist about self-isolation, myself included. What I’d noticed instead were artists experiencing a collective, organic re-assessment of what their work means and their art’s purpose. I’d been reading about a guru who’d suggested that whoever we were before the pandemic would only be magnified during self-isolation. I thought perhaps the same could be said for our work, or maybe the crisis would instead crack open a global, creative breakthrough. In art, these breakthroughs can be total reinvention or a leap from the springboards we’ve been building. Here are a few ideas: