[/caption]Dragon's Teeth, from 2008, 24"x30", pencil, prismacolor on acrylic primed masonite panel. The title is from the Greek myth about how the teeth of the dragons when planted would grow into fully armed warriors. I came to this title after I made the drawing, not before.
But the topic of the moment is my own creative process. I had dinner with a friend who is an industrial engineer. She designs, or more particularly, redesigns decision making processes in companies. She is able to walk into a place, talk to people, look at their manufacturing systems and their decision making flow and assist them in redesigning for greater efficiency and even happiness.
I demonstrated my process to her at the dinner table at one of those cute restaurants that put the brown paper on top of the table with the shot glass crayons. I explained that I have to have all of my drawing materials close to the table, colored pencils arranged in cans by color families, reds, greens, blues, etc., to the point of sorting the hard and soft standard graphite as well. Then I make a mark, which sparks a visual idea. Sometimes, I'll define a recipe of action on the surface, such as red in a cross hatch motion until the point isn't sharp. Or perhaps a visual decision by stepping back and seeing that the drawing seems to need a temperature change. A thousand decisions almost all quick and non-reflective.
In Dragons' Teeth the limiting factor was a decision to work only in a range of greys, warm greys and cool greys, pulling definition out of the blackness of the substrate.
In a post to the Huffington Post, Kimberly Brooks described The Creative Process in Eight Stages.They are vision, hope, excitement, suspicion, clarity, obsession and resolution. The best quote is from Jerry Belson who wrote for the Dick Van Dyke Show and the Odd Couple, who would advise his fellow writers who complained about writer's block to "just lay down shit." At some point, have vision and hope, and then just lay it down. Or even better don't worry about the hope thing, just put something down.
The biggest barrier to being an artist is having the courage to jump into the unknown and lay down shit to see what happens.
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