Exploring The Act of Creating — Beyond the Need for Accolades
Changing Seasons | What Newness Brings
Summer is fading. I welcome sleeping now with an extra quilt. And the afternoon rain drama often leads to a landscape refreshed. Rainbows have been happening most days this last week.
My partner & I are both moving through big changes in our career. And we are new to launching other creative work online. He’s a Chef, I have a background in corporate graphic design and branding. We have known success in our careers but are bridging out in our creative efforts into new arenas of jewelry and art. It is an interesting psychological process to be putting ourselves out there in something new at the same time that we are well seasoned in other forms of creative.
It’s not always easy to be patient with starting something new while so experienced in life otherwise. It’s been a long time since we stood at the starting line. And in this day and digital age, we are now judged by the same criteria as those well established. And those are then rewarded by algorithms based on being well known. And in the same arenas where every day the new were discovered - they are now kept quietly on the sidelines due to not being well known. I’m running in to this with my painting, jewelry and writing.
I’m learning to simply be content right now with creating for the sake of creating. And enjoying the time and space that allows me to explore and express myself. And is there strength and trust to be found in creating without narcissistic rewards? And after a 20+ year career of creating for an audience and being critiqued along the way, it feels odd to put work out there without any knowledge of what the viewer is experiencing or even if the work is being seen.
Rick Rubin in his classic new book “The Creative Act” speaks to this process in the chapter “The Unseen.” “… The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm. A longing to transcend. What we create allows us to share glimpses of an inner landscape, one that is beyond our understanding. Art is our portal to the unseen world.
Without the spiritual component, the artist works with a crucial disadvantage. The spiritual world provides a sense of wonder and a degree of open-mindedness not always found within the confines of science. The world of reason can be narrow and filled with dead ends, while a spiritual viewpoint is limitless and invites fantastic possibilities. The unseen world is boundless…
The practice of spirituality is a way of looking at a world where you’re not alone. There are deeper meanings behind the surface. The energy around you can be harnessed to elevate your work. You are part of something much larger than can be explained — a world of immense possibilities…
Pay particular attention to the moments that take your breath away — a beautiful sunset, an unusual eye color, a moving piece of music, the elegant design of a complex machine.
If a piece of work, a fragment of consciousness, or an element of nature is somehow allowing us to access something bigger, that is its spiritual component made manifest. It awards us a glimpse of the unseen.”
I understand this in so many ways. My creativity expresses itself through a very intuitive process. And the process filters through my spiritual path as a yoga practitioner and nature lover but is also pragmatic through years of creative career work involving discovery and implementation. I’m more aware of the audience than most due to this, even attended 10 years of focus groups to dissect communications and design in order to create a psychological connection to the consumer and compete in the marketplace. I’m no stranger to anticipating critical feedback while moving through the act of creating.
I see many modern day painters focused on either the sheer beauty of art in a physical setting or the other extreme as an outlet for expressing and in turn dissipating emotional pain. Each painting telling it’s own individual story. I tend to approach creativity as a prism with multiple mediums offering outlets for different reflective aspects of self. And here I discover and attempt to integrate parts of my complex personality. I’m a Gemini Sun with a Cancer Moon which brings a joyful expressive colorful approach to life and communication through wide reaching discovery and adventure, traveling, researching, learning, exploring. And yet the Cancer Moon is deep, emotional, sensitive — a nurturer, healer, spiritual delver, expansive, bridging to empathically understand self and others. This sensitivity, especially in moments of doubt or questioning, can lead to wading through shadow aspects and bumping into unconscious abstract knowing. I routinely see and feel it all - the joy and the sorrow… found in experiences all around me and take this empathically into myself. And being a complex person, deeply curious, I by nature delve and delve, question, ruminate, reflect. Walks in nature soothe the active mind and return my experience to the spatial and to the body. Yoga is a vehicle for grounding as well.
I will be painting the next few days. And look forward to visually exploring both my ethereal experience of desert SKY and the contrasting grounded raw and rich experience of the EARTH. I tend to enjoy how my paintings — that capture what is around me — synch with the abstract nature of patterns found in gemstones that I work with. Art is so much more than just painting to me. It’s everywhere in Nature — bark on a tree, lichen on a rock, soft colors in a sunset, prisms of light in a rainbow, rich colors of a butterfly and the markings of a bird’s wings. In my experience of the world, jewelry blends into painting and merely source different tools but output in a similar fashion expression of all the world offers. And this plays in to my outfits and the sweaters I knit. The graphic design and letter press printing of my business card. The Pendleton blanket on my day bed. The black and white nature photos on my wall. I’ve never had one defined output. And I tend to explore the expressiveness of beauty AND the deeply emotional and challenging in what I create. I am both and would never have thought to separate them out except when I compare my reality to others — which I am somewhat self consciously prone to right now as I am creating with no connection to an audience at the start of something new.
There is an authenticity and vulnerability to being in this place. And the Spiritual path continues to unfold requiring a trust fall in to the new without immediate reward other than the joy found in the act of creating. And a humility to be found at middle age when so much is already known, learned, discovered, been acknowledged to being “new” and a “beginner”. I liken it to the “Fool” card in the Tarot deck. Often the Fool is required to venture into the new otherwise you would never allow yourself to experience outside of your known comfort zone unless forced upon you. With age, we learn to forecast what pitfalls may happen and can over think everything talking ourselves out of trying. So I guess I’m a bit of a fool right now - but proud of myself for trying. And I am very much enjoying the inner discoveries of expanding in the creative realm. The world is rich within and without. More to come.
