The Complete Artist's Way: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice (24 page)

8. My self-care is _________________________________ .

9. I feel more ___________________________________ .

10. Possibly, my creativity is __________________________ .

Trust in yourself. Your perceptions are often far more accurate than you are willing to believe.

CLAUDIA BLACK

TASKS

1. Make this phrase a mantra:
Treating myself like a precious object will make me strong.
Watercolor or crayon or calligraph this phrase. Post it where you will see it daily. We tend to think being hard on ourselves will make us strong. But it is cherishing ourselves that gives us strength.

2. Give yourself time out to listen to one side of an album, just for joy. You may want to doodle as you listen, allowing yourself to draw the shapes, emotions, thoughts you hear in the music. Notice how just twenty minutes can refresh you. Learn to take these mini—artist dates to break stress and allow insight.

3. Take yourself into a sacred space—a church, synagogue, library, grove of trees—and allow yourself to savor the silence and healing solitude. Each of us has a personal idea of what sacred space is. For me, a large clock store or a great aquarium store can engender a sense of timeless wonder. Experiment.

4. Create one wonderful smell in your house—with soup, incense, fir branches, candles—whatever.

5. Wear your favorite item of clothing for no special occasion.

6. Buy yourself one wonderful pair of socks, one wonderful pair of gloves—one wonderfully comforting, self-loving something.

7. Collage: Collect a stack of at least ten magazines, which you will allow yourself to freely dismember. Setting a twenty-minute time limit for yourself, tear (literally) through the magazines, collecting any images that reflect your life or interests. Think of this collage as a form of pictorial autobiography. Include your past, present, future, and your dreams. It is okay to include images you simply like. Keep pulling until you have a good stack of images (at least twenty). Now take a sheet of newspaper, a stapler, or some tape or glue, and arrange your images in a way that pleases you. (This is one of my students’ favorite exercises.)

8. Quickly list five favorite films. Do you see any common denominators among them? Are they romances, adventures, period pieces, political dramas, family epics, thrillers? Do you see traces of your cinematic themes in your collage?

9. Name your favorite topics to read about: comparative religion, movies, ESP, physics, rags-to-riches, betrayal, love triangles, scientific breakthroughs, sports... Are these topics in your collage?

10. Give your collage a place of honor. Even a secret place of honor is all right—in your closet, in a drawer, anywhere that is yours. You may want to do a new one every few months, or collage more thoroughly a dream you are trying to accomplish.

When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting,

FERNANDO BOTERO

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

C. G. JUNG

CHECK-IN

1. How many days this week did you do your morning pages? Have you allowed yourself to daydream a few creative risks? Are you coddling your artist child with childhood loves?

2. Did you do your artist date this week? Did you use it to take any risks? What did you do? How did it feel?

3. Did you experience any synchronicity this week? What was it?

4. Were there any other issues this week that you consider significant for your recovery? Describe them.

WEEK 8

Recovering a Sense of Strength

T
his week tackles another major creative block: time. You will explore the ways in which you have used your perception of time to preclude taking creative risks. You will identify immediate and practical changes you can make in your current life. You will excavate the early conditioning that may have encouraged you to settle for far less than you desire creatively.

SURVIVAL

ONE OF THE MOST difficult tasks an artist must face is a primal one: artistic survival. All artists must learn the art of surviving loss: loss of hope, loss of face, loss of money, loss of self-belief. In addition to our many gains, we inevitably suffer these losses in an artistic career. They are the hazards of the road and, in many ways, its signposts. Artistic losses can be turned into artistic gains and strengths—but not in the isolation of the beleaguered artist’s brain.

As mental-health experts are quick to point out, in order to move through loss and beyond it, we must acknowledge it and share it. Because artistic losses are seldom openly acknowledged or mourned, they become artistic scar tissue that blocks artistic growth. Deemed too painful, too silly, too humiliating to share and so to heal, they become, instead, secret losses.

If artistic creations are our brainchildren, artistic losses are our miscarriages. Women often suffer terribly, and privately, from losing a child who doesn’t come to term. And as artists we suffer terrible losses when the book doesn’t sell, the film doesn’t get picked up, the juried show doesn’t take our paintings, the best pot shatters, the poems are not accepted, the ankle injury sidelines us for an entire dance season.

I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice
.

ERICH FROMM

Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most.

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKI

We must remember that our artist is a child and that what we can handle intellectually far outstrips what we can handle emotionally. We must be alert to flag and mourn our losses.

The disappointing reception of a good piece of work, the inability to move across into a different medium or type of role due to other people’s expectations of us are artistic losses that must be mourned. It does no good to say, “Oh, it happens to everybody” or “Who was I kidding anyway?” The unmourned disappointment becomes the barrier that separates us from future dreams. Not being cast in the role that’s “yours,” not being asked to join the company, having the show canceled or the play unreviewed—these are all losses.

Perhaps the most damaging form of artistic loss has to do with criticism. The artist within, like the child within, is seldom hurt by truth. I will say again that much true criticism liberates the artist it is aimed at. We are childlike, not childish.
Ah-hah!
is often the accompanying inner sound when a well-placed, accurate critical arrow makes its mark. The artist thinks, “Yes! I can see that! That’s right! I can change that!”

The criticism that damages an artist is the criticism—well intentioned or ill—that contains no saving kernel of truth yet has a certain damning plausibility or an unassailable blanket judgment that cannot be rationally refuted.

Teachers, editors, mentors are often authority figures or parent figures for a young artist. There is a sacred trust inherent in the bond between teacher and student. This trust, when violated, has the impact of a parental violation. What we are talking about here is emotional incest.

A trusting student hears from an unscrupulous teacher that good work is bad or lacks promise or that he, the guru-teacher, senses a limit to the student’s real talent or was mistaken in seeing talent, or doubts that there is talent.... Personal in nature, nebulous as to specifics, this criticism is like covert sexual harassment—a sullying yet hard to quantify experience. The student emerges shamed, feeling like a bad artist, or worse, a fool to try.

THE IVORY POWER

It has been my perilous privilege over the past decade to undertake teaching forays into the groves of academia. It is my experience as a visiting artist that many academics are themselves artistic beings who are deeply frustrated by their inability to create. Skilled in intellectual discourse, distanced by that intellectual skill from their own creative urgings, they often find the creativity of their charges deeply disturbing.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Devoted as they are to the scholarly appreciation of art, most academics find the beast intimidating when viewed firsthand. Creative-writing programs tend to be regarded with justified suspicion: those people aren’t studying creativity, they’re actually practicing it! Who knows where this could lead?

I am thinking particularly of a film-department chair of my acquaintance, a gifted filmmaker who for many years had been unable or unwilling to expose himself to the rigors and disappointments of creating. Channeling his ferocious creative urges into the lives of his students, he alternately over-controlled and undercut their best endeavors, seeking to vicariously fulfill or justify his own position on the sidelines.

As much as I wanted to dislike this man—and I certainly disliked his behaviors—I found myself unable to regard him without compassion. His own thwarted creativity, so luminous in his early films, had darkened to shadow first his own life and then the lives of his students. In the truest sense, he was a creative monster.

It took more years and more teaching for me to realize that academia harbors a far more subtle and deadly foe to the creative spirit. Outright hostility, after all, can be encountered. Far more dangerous, far more soul-chilling, is the subtle discounting that may numb student creativity in the academic grove.

I am thinking now of my time at a distinguished research university, where my teaching colleagues published widely and well on film topics of the most esoteric and exotic stripe. Highly regarded among their intellectual peers, deeply immersed in their own academic careers, these colleagues offered scant mirroring to the creative students who passed through their tutelage. They neglected to supply that most rudimentary nutrient: encouragement.

Surround yourself with people who respect and treat you well.

CLAUDIA BLACK

To the rationally minded the mental processes of the intuitive appear to work backwards.

FRANCES WICKES

Creativity cannot be comfortably quantified in intellectual terms. By its very nature, creativity eschews such containment. In a university where the intellectual life is built upon the art of criticizing—on deconstructing a creative work—the art of creation itself, the art of creative construction, meets with scanty support, understanding, or approval. To be blunt, most academics know how to take something apart, but not how to assemble it.

Student work, when scrutinized, was seldom
appreciated.
Far from it. Whatever its genuine accomplishments, it was viewed solely in terms of its shortfalls. Time and again I saw promising work met with a volley of should-have-dones, could-have-dones, and might-have-dones, instead of being worked with as it was.