The Four Elements of Creativity. (4)

The following was written as a lecture for my students and all young artists. I will be publishing one element each day in my blog for the next four days. To read this lecture in proper sequence, please scroll to the first entry below titled "Fire" and read upwards from there. Thank you.

EARTH



Philip Guston, "Pit" 1976

I threw an I-Ching once in my reckless, younger years that read something like this;
"If you are planning your work, analyzing your work, sitting back and admiring your work....then you are planning, analyzing and admiring, but you are not working. If you have a gift from God, then get down and do it."
I never threw another I-Ching again. This one stuck.

I've sustained my painting career over the last twenty-five or more years hovering just ever so slightly above the gravity of the earth. Ironically, I get more creative altitude if I reach for smaller goals than higher. Lofty thoughts of artistic recognition early on in life were soon replaced with, "OK, what's the next art project?" Eventually, I learned it was more important to try to make great work than it was to try to be great.

Non-artists always make the mistake of thinking we artists are driven by inspiration. That late at night, great balls of firey revelations reveal themselves to us and we jump from our beds, and out of our skin, to lay down mused findings at two in the morning with our God-given talents. No, more likely we take little baby steps in concrete shoes. One step, than the next. It unfolds slowly with much effort. We pick up the steps from where past artists have left off; trying to continue the work they've already started but mortality ended. There's a reason why artists call the practice of their craft a "discipline."

If a young artist were to ask me how they could aspire to great things, I would tell them; "Learn to accommodate mediocrity." Not in your art, but in everything else that nurtures or otherwise "subordinates" it. As long as gravity exist, we will be pulled down to this base level. Here's where we pay rent. Here's where we do the laundry. Learn to balance your checkbook. Fortunately, it takes so little creative energy to tend this dirt garden. But ignore or neglect it and it will bury you and your aspirations alive. Stardom, if it happens to you and the very few, may only happen for a very short time. If you're in it for a lifetime, then you must learn to fly a very long distance, hovering just ever so slightly above the earth, weighed down in concrete shoes.

The Four Elements of Creativity. (3)

The following was written as a lecture for my students and all young artists. I will be publishing one element each day in my blog for the next four days. To read this lecture in proper sequence, please scroll to the first entry below titled "Fire" and read upwards from there. Thank you.

AIR



Ross Bleckner, Untitled (Sphere and moulding) 1987

This was the hardest element to write about. The words kept evading me.

In Italo Calvino's book, "6 Memos for the Next Millennium" his essay "Lightness" lays out the argument that artists are always trying to throw off weight. This weight could refer to the heaviness of words as a writer, or in my case as a painter, the too thick thingness of my plastic materials. I am reminded of a ziggurat, a pyramid of steps for us mortals to climb closer to the heavens, constructed from a mountain of materials. Its as if the very means from which we strive to ascend is the thing that also weighs us down.

An artist once told me she didn't care where she lived geographically, "because when I work, I'm 'up there'." This statement is more the potent when one realizes the many lives behind this particular artist. Suffering her family to the horrors of the holocaust, fleeing the Iron Curtain, living in Paris, Israel, New York and now, finding herself in a small rural American town. Her ability to escape the pain and geography of her past by simply working her way to "up there" spoke volumes to where all artists arise and descend from.

Where is "up there", and how does one get to it?" I always forget how I got there myself. Despite the many steps of the ziggurat, the road to heaven is blocked from easy access. The jealous gods will not allow artists to be their equal, so they hide the ascension into divinity. They lash out at mortals who attempt to ascend "up there" where the gods dwell, just as Prometheus was punished for stealing fire for humanity. Likewise, Aphrodite became jealous of Psyche's beauty and sent Eros "down here" to shoot his arrow at her. No, artists cannot be gods, at best, a demi-god like Michelangelo, but never a god. So, we must sneak our way "up there" by stepping our way through the rituals of our work. Climbing the steps of our ziggurat blindly, hoping we will arrive. The way to divinity is always a new puzzle to refigure with no assurance of success.

I often go to my studio, after the distractions of a real life, and say, "Now, where was I?" I have to pull out old work to reassure myself that I've risen to "up there" once before, and that I might find it again if I work some more, work myself into a cathartic trance that puts me into a state of feeling no pain or geographic boundaries.

The Four Elements of Creativity. (2)

The following was written as a lecture for my students and all young artists. I will be publishing one element each day in my blog for the next four days. To read this lecture in proper sequence, please scroll to the first entry below titled "Fire" and read upwards from there. Thank you.

WATER


J.M.W.Turner "The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up" 1838


Ann Hamilton was quoted in the New York Times as saying something to this effect;
"You can't really force great ideas to happen. The best you can do is float yourself in a situation that is conducive to thinking, and wait for great ideas to surface"

My favorite step in the process of painting is in the middle, when the painting is neither the start of a blank canvas nor my efforts' end result. It’s when the canvas is full of paint and color, but still coming and undefined as yet. I stretch my mind across the picture plane along with the paint that has been spread across the canvas. Suspended there, we move in and rise out of the plane, waiting for the forms to emerge, the hues to take hold, the ideas to surface. This is the medium in which I float myself in.

There are many mediums that I could choose to float in; electronic, dialectic, religious, alcoholic....? Some mediums I swim in more eloquently than others, as in painting when I effortlessly do a backstroke from my many years of practice. At this moment, however, I am suspended in a pool of words. I doggy paddle here.

Perhaps our need to float in any given medium comes from a need to experience what cannot, or should not, be defined? Water has no form of its own; it continuously adopts the shape of whatever contains it. Suspending ourselves in a medium becomes the form in which we think in, and the medium often does the thinking for us. In this way, the thinking, though cogitative, is never objective. Does a fish know if he's in water?

The Four Elements of Creativity.

The following was written as a lecture for my students and all young artists. I will be publishing one element each day in my blog for the next four days. To read this lecture in proper sequence, please scroll to the first entry below titled "Fire" and read upwards from there. Thank you.

FIRE


Jackson Pollock, Number One, 1948

In Rollo May’s "Courage to Create", he makes the argument that before there can be an act of creation, there must be an act of destruction. He was mostly referring to the established structures of ideas that must be overthrown when innovating new concepts in science or art. But what if the process of creating is more intrinsically connected to destruction? Concepts and ideas aside, what if they are primordially connected on a base level inseparable from the onset of the action?

I recall watching a TV documentary of a young boy who had a cleft, not in his palette, but in his entire face. His far too far apart eyes were separated by a caved in nose and his forehead had too wide a span from temple to temple. The doctors incised his skin across his head in an arc from ear to ear. They then pealed his fleshy face down below his mouth and removed a section from the too wide brow bone in its center. With the center forehead space gone, they pushed the temples closer together. Taking the extra brow bone material to the table, they began to whack at it with a chisel, chipping away a shape suitable for the boy's new nose bridge.

What was disturbing to me about this procedure was not the reminder of my mortality, the moroseness of the operation, nor the vulnerability of pliable flesh against cold steel. My unease derived from my empathy with the doctors. I knew that energy. They weren't handling that bone with kit gloves; they were banging and beating it. Any person unfamiliar with creativity would have been so concerned with the preciousness of the material that they would have been paralyzed to transform it. Frozen, they would ask, "Where am I going to get more of this bone that I'm making into a nose if I accidentally destroy it?" But, there's an urgency here. Something has already been destroyed and recreating it successfully is paramount.