In this blog I share some of the ideas and thoughts that I have developed in the context of teaching skills and techniques in drawing, painting and related areas. The posts below are written in a style that aims to encourage discussions amongst people about practical aspects of working creatively rather than contribute to academic debate. The emphasis in my posts is about establishing and sustaining a creative practice and considering how creative work might affect our sense of self and the challenges this might bring.
De-personalise the challenge!
We all have internal chatter: a voice, our own voice, talks to us inside our head. This communication we have with ourselves is often about things that trouble us, that we can’t get a handle on. Establishing and maintaining a creative practice often means that our wishes about how we would like to work, what we would like to achieve and how we hope that artmaking ‘feels like’ is very different from how it actually happens.
Nothing is easy. Creative work means that we constantly have to solve problems, and we deal with ‘not knowing’ about things: not knowing what to do next, how to overcome a lack of skills (yes, we are working on developing them…) or why something has not worked. Some people are able to assess such situations as they arise and analyse and evaluate them in reference to inappropriate artmaking tools, and they might also devise a plan to acquire required skills, or improve the working environment. I am not one of these people for whom such analysis and evaluation comes easily. Though I know that improvement sits in exactly the betterment of the factors mentioned above - I get a lot of distraction in my head that relates my not-so-successful artmaking to my person: I tell myself, that I am guilty of not working efficiently enough, that I SHOULD have conquered this artmaking challenge a long time ago, but, because I am lazy I have not. I might even feel that the situation at hand is just the perfect manifestation of how little talent I have got for doing this kind of creative activity (oh… the topic of talent….). Should I - at all - be doing this? I might be wasting my time ….
Negative self-chatter, guilt, and blaming yourself, … we have learnt to resort to these strategies because the emotional pain that comes with them is so hard to bear that we just might try harder. Such strategies are often the result of others wanting us to do things. I recommend not to rely on growing and sustaining an arts practice on negativity about yourself. But, you might say…. “…at least, be… ‘r e a l i s t i c’…you are NOT a great painter…..”! As a justification for our negativity, we believe that we cannot do without realism in a situation of doubt. Negative down-talk diminishes your ability to engage with and feel the colours, the flow of your linework on the paper, to imagine new artwork and respond to what inspires you. When you get negative internal chatter about the value of your person, or your work, or your talent - give yourself the permission to have awareness of it. Denial won’t work. Then, try to disengage from it. The artmaking process has plenty of more useful aspects that you need to concentrate on. De-personalise your challenge: try to trace what is not working to your tools use and techniques, and to your artmaking intentions. And, modify your expectations. What are the exact reason why this picture has not worked? Find out exactly the FACTS of your challenging situation. If you can’t find a solution - try again, and again. Speak to others - they may have incountered the same problem. But: de-personalise the challenge. Make yourself free from guilt, blame, negative attributes - they will only twist what is the real challenge at hand: the materials you work with, the skills you got or not got, the patterns or processes you employ. Which ones do you repeat again and again? You need your personal sensing capacities for seeing and feeling colour, touching of paper with a brush or performing the next movement of your arm to produce a brushstroke on paper.
However, dealing with negative internal chatter is not something you can just switch off. Some of us may have patterns of guilt, blame, of feeling embarrassed that get triggered when something happens - and artmaking situations might not be the only occassions when this occurs. For many creative people, artmaking may mean to be dealing with two challenges: firstly, with the artmaking process, and, secondly, with our own self-awareness in the context of creative undertakings . You could understand your artmaking process as a bit of self-therapy where you try to address this issue, and then congratulate yourself for every step of progress. I have a lot of personal experience with these challenges…. with trying to play music…and the negative self-chatter got in the way. I can report however, that I stubbornly stuck with the pursuit of it…and, I have managed to play and convince myself out of my difficulties. Currently, I am learning to windsurf - and, I am dealing with both, the self-chatter and the learning of skills. Yes, I am making progress….and so can you!
Get your markers in!
Sometimes, we only got a few minutes to work on something. We may not even be in our usual place where we have all our materials and the familiarity of surroundings. In fact, the particularity about this arising possibility to paint, or draw or make some notes feels awkward… it may not fit our criteria and expectations for what needs to be right for you to start working. You might think that something is ‘too difficult’ about the situation, e g. you have landed in an artmaking group where you believe that everybody is on a higher level (what is a higher level….?). You might feel insecure about starting because you have questions about what you will get out of if, if it is worth digging into this opportunity, or, if you might risk to increase your insecurities. I suggest you take the opportunity and get your markers in - even if you find that the situation is not perfect according to your usual intentions. Establishing or maintaining a regular arts practice is full of challenges. And, it is harder to get yourself used to working regularly when you have not yet developed this pattern of working. Every occasion that you grab to engage with the divers insecurities that artmaking presents is like a walk undertaken in an unfamiliar landscape. Even if you don’t manage to see all the sights and manoeuvre all the challenges on the ground, you will still reduce your unfamiliarity with the artmaking landscape, and replace areas labelled as “I don’t know” with “have some experience”. This will massively increase your believe in yourself. We gain confidence by having consciously navigated difficulties. So, put your markers in!!
Making it easy for yourself
It can be hard work to establish a pattern of regularly working on your own creative project. Daily lives are huge distractions and starting out to establish a rhythm of working again and again on your creative interests is difficult not only because of the organisation, motivation, commitment and practical arrangements this necessitates but also because you need to push other positions in your daily or weekly schedules aside to make space. I find that it is harder to establish a new habit of working on something than it is to maintain a practice that I have already established. I compare my artmaking a lot with other activities in my life that I like to do, e.g. playing guitar or going out for a bike ride. On a Saturday morning I go on a bike ride. On Tuesday night, I join my band mates for music rehearsals. In the absence of external circumstances, e.g. dates to work with other people or joining a class where you have committed to book your place, there is less requirement to adhere to your plan to show up and work. When working on your own, setting your on schedule for when such work happens and where is difficult. Yet, this kind of independent work that you might do all on your own follows your own interests, develops your personal, unique artmaking skills and builds your confidence. I suggest that you consider the following idea when you are starting out to develop your own arts practice: make it easy for yourself! Choose to do practical work that is not too difficult, that you might already know how to do, and of which you know that you like doing it. Don’t aim high with expectations for outcomes (we are our best enemies when it comes to aiming too high, for goals that are - realistically seen - too far way), but aim for a regular return to your desk. If you want - as a goal for your whole practice - to engage with the landscape of a certain valley - don’t demand of yourself to paint a full on picture in your first sitting. You might just start to sort out your paints, and make tests of the paints you got, spots of paint on paper…. Don’t aim and plan for three hour sessions - they may require a huge reshuffling of other daily schedules - start with 10 minutes of sitting down. Making it easy for yourself and lowering expectations will take the pressure out of your next practical session. Aiming for a short amount of time to be spent working - and then maybe staying longer, because it was easy to do - works well to establish a temporal pattern of working creatively. What matters most at this stage is that you return to your desk. Admittedly, it can be challenging to know what alternatives to your big goals you might have to establish your practice. The less familiar you are with the practical whereabouts of your creative interest, the more difficult it might be to understand what alternatives you might have to work, the alternatives to the big-goal-approach. It is always helpful to seek out communication with other people, talk to them about your work, and the problems you encounter; other artists have exactly these kind of issues too!
Creative work changes you as a person
We all have a certain concept of ourselves. Who we are, what we do, how we relate our own story about ourselves and our world. When we start doing creative work, we may find out that we have to change our assumptions about ourselves and our stories. Working creatively is a forward progression marked by trial and error. Not all our attempts will work as we expected. We might call such outcomes ‘a mistake’ or, better, an ‘unexpected results’. The mistakes that we make when we work creatively may challenge our concept of ourselves. Many of us have tried all our lives to avoid mistakes as we aim for being as successful as we can. Creative work is different. We only improve when we try things out and we have to accept that part of progression is to discover what does not work. We might find that it is hard for us to accept this. It may also be that we struggle to negotiate with ourselves that we actually DO manage to do creative things. How does this sit with the concept of the self that we might have had so far? Often, part of the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves is that we are NOT creative… but now, we actually find out that, we are?
Also, we might find it difficult to make other people in our lives understand that we are doing creative work. We might feel hesitation to engage in creative things because we just don’t know how to explain and justify this ‘new thing’ to others. Sharing stories about your practical creative work and how you feel about making it is the best way to deal with such issues!