Storm sailor

Last week a fellow musician, who by the way has challenged himself to write a song per week, told me he'd written a song inspired by one of my paintings, posted above.  He even sang it for me. 

Art feeding art.

I don't know if I can adequately explain how encouraging and creatively satiating this was for my often starving artist's soul.  Dare I admit that my artistic self is often like a beggar, desperate to be fed with kind words about the value of my creativity?

Does anyone else feel this way? 

At the same time I'm thinking more about my need and my calling to be autonomous;  to create no matter what others say.  It's a mysterious paradox, this being made both for creative community and for independence.

This picture, by the way, was painted last winter, about the time I started this blog.     

Summertime trigger

Interesting to think over my art blog gaps and wonder why these occur.  This low key summer isn't much of an excuse.  I've had the time.  Our internet works. Our computer hasn't been stolen and I haven't even broken both arms.

In light of my most recent art blog gap I'm realizing I've had an underlying dread of summer for most of my life.  Funny how not blogging about creativity would bring this to light.  It's becoming clearer to me that this dread stems from so many childhood Junes when my restless father made his yearly announcement we might move.  Summers were when we travelled with him on his itinerant lecture tours. We saw many countries and richly cultured places.  And we watched my dad research possible relocations for our family.  Mercifully, I still spent most of my school years living in one place with  friendship continuity during school months.  Even so, by end of June, most of these friends, who attended an international boarding school where I was a day student, headed back to their parents and homes in other countries.  Summer strikes again. 

Now I'm wondering, since I do that a lot, if certain seasons trigger anyone else creativily, either toward increased freedom or toward artistic blocks.  And what might be underneath these triggers? 

Something very useful I've gained from my part time work in holistic health is that the more issues are acknowledged and identified, the simpler the correction for them is.  Time, or summertime, will tell if this is true for creativity. 

Acceptable medium

    I chatted yesterday with a fellow musician who also likes to sew.  She said she can't draw or paint but wishes she could since she sees pictures in her head.  I asked if she could make these pictures in fabric instead.  An "aha" moment for us both. 
    Now I'm wondering how many artistic blocks come from what we believe are acceptable or unacceptable mediums for our ideas.

Creative spirits

    There's a youtube "Ted Talks" lecture on creativity by author Elizabeth Gilbert, famous for "Eat, Pray, Love".  Elizabeth deligthfully spoke of how the idea of  "tormented artists undone by their own gifts" came to be.

     Ancient Greeks and Romans, she said, used to view creativity as something also outside themselves: a mysterious interaction with a divine attendant spirit of creativity.  The Romans called this sort of spirit "genius". This perspective meant a protective distance between the artist and the entire responsibility for and results of their work.  In the age of rationalism, however, people made themselves the center of all things.  Including creativity.  As a result, the entire burden for making art was placed on the artist.

    Elizabeth then told of her conversations with aged American poet Ruth Stone.  Ruth told her that growing up in rural Virginia she'd be in the fields when she felt and heard a poem coming over the landscape toward her.  Ruth ran home as fast as she could to paper and pen before the poem thundered through her.  Sometimes she wasn't fast enough and the poem passed her by.  If she was just a little late, she'd grab the pen in one hand and reach for the poem in the air with the other, pulling it back into her. 

    Ms. Gilbert then told the audience straightfaced, "It's uncanny, because that's just how I create".  To chuckles, she went on to say she's actually more of a mule most of the time, getting up the same time each day, plodding away at her writing.  But, she concluded, she's also seeing and experiencing creativity more now as a wondrous collaboration between what's me and not quite me.  This working from a source that we can't quite identify.  Relating to that source so we don't lose our minds but are, in fact, kept sane by it.

If you want to write

    One of my favorite books on creativity is called "If you want to Write" by writer/teacher Brenda Ueland.  I'm returning to it again in snippets, trying not to underline every sentence, telling myself I own the whole book and can read any of it wheneeeevvvvver I want to.

    In the beginning she talks about Van Gogh and his simple, poignant letters on art to his younger brother.  Here are some quotes from those letters:

    "My only anxiety is what I can do...could I not be of use and good for something?...And in a picture I wish to say something that would console as music does."

     "The world only concerns me in so far as I feel a certain debt and duty towards it and out of gratitude want to leave some souvenir in the shape of drawings or pictures, not to please a certain tendancy in art but to express sincere human feeling."

     Brenda writes further of Van Gogh," He loved something - say the sky.  He loved human beings.  He wanted to show human beings how beautiful the sky was.  So he painted it for them. And that was all there was to it."   And this, " By painting the sky, Van Gogh was really able to see it and adore it better than if he had just looked at it.  In the same way, as I would tell my class, you will never know what your husband looks like unless you try to draw him, and you will never understand him unless you try to write his story."

Limited Access

     The imagination can be both wonderful and terrible.  Like a wild horse that could take you far if broken, or if it had its way, toss and break its rider.  As a child and beyond I didn't know my imagination could and should have limits.  A lot of the time imagination controlled me, mostly in painting vivid, fearful scenarios for which I was bound to produce a survival plan in the private terror of my mind. 
     While I've become very good at resourcefulness and problem solving, I much regret those years of subservience.  I was a willing hostage to the wiles of my own thoughts.  A lot of energy was wasted running mental and emotional errands for ideas that had no real authority over me, not to mention being totally void of Truth & Beauty. 
     Today I'm still waiting to hear news, anything really, from some loved ones who are in southern Africa.  The communication turn-about has been longer than usual, though still just days.  Fear knocks at the storehouse of my mind. Throws out some possibilities and asks me to check inventory for solutions.  I pause.  Consider better uses for my resources.  And firmly shut the door.

Biola ArtTalks

Here are some quotes from a couple lectures given at Biola University by Dr. John Mark Reynolds on art, truth and culture.  Hefty stuff.

"Any culture that can't explain Hamlet isn't worth surviving."

"The poets are the doctors of the soul."

..."I believe that myth ( a big term for music, poetry, art etc.) becomes the tool to shape our soul for Paradise...."

"To shape your soul is as important as building a bulldozer to shape the dirt out there."

"We need medicine for our souls in our poetry, art and music.  We do not need to sate our souls."

"An artist to be taken seriously will have to justify the goodness, truth and beauty of the art they produce, and no longer hide behind the notion that it is just saying what I have to say."