Creative Stifle

How to be an artist? Or more rather how not to be an artist? Yes, be afraid, be very afraid of being ridiculed, laughed at and questioned as to your sanity. Be afraid of being analyzed, asked questions like "have you stopped making the black paintings because you're not depressed anymore?" Or, can you make it to fit my couch in my colors, lilac and lavender?

We deliberately stifle our own creativity and those of others who dare.

From an article in HR Magazine of August 1999 reviewing a book enitled "Orbiting the Giant Hairball."

The first chapter dares to ask how society has managed to stifle genius and hamper creativity even among schoolchildren. When MacKenzie visited elementary schools to talk about his job, he asked the students how many of them were artists. Although almost all of the first-graders said yes, only one or two sixth-graders claimed to be artists. Adults too can unleash their creative genius if they are strong enough to risk ridicule and challenge the status quo.

Art & Fear

Art & Fear from an artist's perspective, not the viewer's. I am reading Art & Fear: Observations on the perils (and rewards) of artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland (1993, Image Continuum Press), which I picked up this morning at my local library.

We artists are plagued by doubts and fears. These fears fall into two general categories, fears about ourselves and about our reception by others (p. 23). Bayles and Orland enumerate a list as follows:

I'm not an artist--I'm a phony
I have nothing worth saying
I'm not sure what I'm doing
Other people are better than I am
I'm only a student [student/physicist/mother/whatever]
I've never had a real exhibit
No one understands my work
No one likes my work
I'm no good
(p. 13)

All of which are potentially true, but all of which are totally destructive of the art-making process. These authors bring out another interesting point, which is that if as is true in the academic art-world, that 95% of the MFA and BFA graduates are not making art in 10 years, that if this was the case in the medical profession there would be congressional investigations.

Fear of failure and fear of success are the only reasons.

Response to 40 Years Old and Still Waiting

[caption id="attachment_263" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Pentimento II, 22x30in., Colored pencil, oil stick, graphite on 140 lb. 100% rag paper, 2005"][/caption]

My studio mate Norbert Marszalek, a wonderful artist, and a thoughtful blogger with strong opinions, has a post "40 Years Old and Still Waiting to Emerge" in which he questions the definition of what is an emerging artist. I'm 60 years old and just emerging. Norbert references Malcolm Gladwell's article in the New Yorker contrasting the lives and achievements of precocious artists versus late bloomers.

I think that there has been way, way too much emphasis in our culture on youthful precocity. I consider myself to be a late-bloomer, even though I knew I wanted to be an artist from when I was seven or eight, went to art schools to study art, design, painting and drawing, getting a BA and an MFA. But after obtaining that MFA at the crest of the baby-boom and futile attempts to find a teaching position at art departments in universities and colleges nation-wide, I wandered off the art-path to search for a career. Never found a career but found a good day job, one with real benefits, health insurance etc.

But five years ago, I got the itch and issued a challenge to myself; I wanted to know if I was still capable of making art. I bought 100 sheets of 18x24" watercolor paper, some colored pencils, an oil painting starter set. I decided that I would know after those 100 pieces of paper were painted if I was an artist, capable of continuing. I only got to 70 but I knew that I was "back."

The main difference between myself as the younger artist and now is that I'm not waiting for the big ideas, not worrying about "being" an artist. I make art. I have a discipline now that I never had when I was younger because I spent and wasted a whole lot of time worrying about the big idea. I have discovered that for me the making of art is a process, not a big idea. I have discovered that the big ideas come only after the making of the art. For me art is a making not a thinking.

Which isn't to say that I don't think. I have a mental process in which I am making a thousand million decisions about what to do and where to put my hand with the pencil or brush. But it is a process that is as unself-conscious as I can do. I have learned to then sit and look and think. I know have a whole mental vocabulary of analytical tools in my head that I never had 30 years ago.

None of this answers Norbert's question, which goes to recognition. Like Norbert, I resent and question the attention that is given to super-stars just out of their MFA programs at the age of 25 or 30. They haven't lived much of an artistic inner life of making and thinking. And there is the frustration of finding our audience, our customers, our own recognition.

The greatest artists become truly great in their old age, Rembrandt, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Agnes Martin, Alice Neel.