The Living Artist

Sometimes too many ideas can be worse, for me, than too few.

If I have too few ideas, it’s easy to fix. I just live life – reading books, going for walks, talking with friends, letting the experience of living fill my creative well. There are mountains of words written online and off on how to unleash your creativity, and most of them make complex tasks out of something that is, for me, very simple – just live, and breathe, and be open, and it will come. Sometimes all I need is time, even, for the next creative seed to come sprouting out of my heart.

Right now, though, I have the opposite problem: too *many* ideas. (I know, I know, cry me a river.) But it’s more of an issue than it seems. All of these ideas are clamoring for headspace, clamoring for time, and I only have so much. As soon as I get focused on one idea, another comes worming its way in like a jealous sibling, whining for more attention. I try to split my focus, go back and forth, multitask, and all that’s happening is my attention is splintering into shards too tiny to be of any use.

Some of it is that long-standing, oft-proven-wrong-but-still-sticking-around fear that if I don’t pay immediate attention to an idea, it will be lost and irretrievable. Despite knowing full well that ideas are cheap, and even if I do forget one it will come back later in a more robust and vibrant form, the fear of its loss is still present, hobbling me from picking one from the herd of ideas clamoring for priority.

The only way out I’ve got is, as when I have too few ideas, to wait. Wait for one idea to come forth with a brighter and shinier toy. Wait for the ones without staying power to get bored and wander away. (Yes, I realize that I’m talking about ideas as if they were small children. This is, more often than not, quite accurate.) Wait, and breathe, and remember that I have time, even if it never feels that way. Rarely is anything to be gained by forcing the issue, and never when there is not a very specific problem at hand (such as a deadline).

I suffer from the perennial problem, in my personal life as well as my artistic one, that when a situation is somehow stuck or blocked, I want desperately to just poke it with a stick until something shifts. All too often the universe seems determined to teach me just how counterproductive that strategy is.

Interestingly, writing this out has sparked the germ of a new idea…

Back in the infancy of this blog, I did a post on the #1 question that creative types always get, namely “where do you get your ideas?” Now I’m visiting the topic again, this time in visual form, addressing what that moment looks like when an idea congeals into an image in my head.

Birth of an Idea by Heather Keith Freeman
11×15″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

The idea may come from anywhere, but it’s channeled through my throat and third-eye chakras (having to do with communication and intuition, respectively), swirling out of me and coalescing into a vortex of… there – there it is. My breath catches – my eyes widen. I feel uplifted, hopeful, excited, energized.

It looks like this.

This is a true self-portrait, meant not only to represent my energetic self but actually to resemble my features, something I’ve tried many times but never succeeded in before. According to my husband, the resemblance is “spooky”, so I’m guessing I did okay! I wear glasses, normally, but other than that this is me. (Compare to the actual photograph on my ‘About’ page.)

Technical Notes:

I’ve talked before about how racist typical art education is; all the models, all the how-tos and anatomy lessons, are based almost exclusively on white models. Happily this seems to be improving in recent years, if only as judged by the diversity of the models in artist’s reference books; but when I was learning human anatomy, Ruby’s The Human Figure: A Photographic Reference for Artists was where it was at, and that was all white except for a headshot or two in the back section.

Anyway, I’ve been concentrating on representing people of color in my work over the last year, with a fair bit of success. I didn’t think this would come up when I ventured into self-portrait territory, because obviously I’m pretty damned white. However, I do have about 1/16 Native American blood, if family legend is to be believed, and I realized for the first time when doing this piece that I don’t have Caucasian eyes. Caucasian eyes are, simplistically speaking, ovals. Mine are trapezoidal teardrops, with a very flat bottom line, a subtle difference that turned out to make all the difference when it came to making a face actually look like me.

After writing my thoughts on art about rape yesterday, and reading what meloukhia wrote today (short version of my revelation: if I don’t feel right creating work about rape when I haven’t been raped, that shifts the burden onto survivors, which isn’t fair), I have my idea.

And this is the point where I don’t tell you about it, lest it kill the potential.

Of course, I’m leaving Sunday for a week in Pittsburgh, then a weekend in Indianapolis, then coming back to pack for the whirlwind move, so who knows how long it will be before I can work on it! But it’s there, I’ve got notes on it, and it will be done. In time for Shira’s blogathon, even.

Right, then. Off to work.

I don’t usually talk about the specifics of my idea generation process. In part because large bits of it are subconscious, but also in part because talking about it seems to kill it a lot of the time. It’s like if I describe a half-formed idea in words, the magic goes out of it and it stops developing. I usually have to put it on the back burner and come back to it after I’ve forgotten the conversation.

Right now, though, I have a project I’ve committed to and NO IDEAS AT ALL. So I might as well talk about it, right?

Anyway. My friend Shira does Blogathon every year for the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. This year she’s incorporating an auction of donated pieces by artists and craftspeople who have been affected by rape.

That’s right up my art/activism alley. I’ve never been raped, but I have close friends who have been, and I’ve sure as hell been harassed, objectified, and otherwise diminished by rape culture.

But I still can’t get past the barrier of feeling like I have no right to make art about rape.

Also, most of my art (as you may have noticed) involves naked women. The reasons for this are many and layered, but suffice it to say that I’m generally not comfortable drawing clothes. Either it’s technically tedious and annoying, or it interferes with the lines, or it feels like it’s getting in between the viewer and the idea, or…. But drawing a person naked in a piece about rape when I haven’t been raped…. feels like exploitation.

Add to that that I don’t want to do a piece on “this is what rape looks like”. Not that that isn’t valuable – it places a human face on those society usually wants to ignore – but that, to me, feels like work that should be done by survivors. I don’t want to appropriate their experiences and feelings, or warp them with my biases. I’m drawn to a different focus. Pointing towards a necessary shift in attitude. Examining assumptions that we make because of rape culture. Pointing out that men are raped, and women are rapists, too. A different perspective, maybe one that will resonate personally with someone who thinks they haven’t been affected by rape, or who thinks they aren’t part of the problem (hint: we all are part of the problem. The culture brainwashes us into not seeing it.). But how to do this?

These are all issues I’ve read about over and over in print, but they’re nuanced and layered and I can’t seem to find that pure core statement of “PAINT ME”. Many of my pieces incorporate text, but the emotional punch, the shining center, comes from the figure. The text just provides context, and a reason for the viewer to keep looking until they’ve absorbed it all.

So I’m kind of lost. I volunteered for this months ago, thinking I had tons of time. The time is ticking away, and I’m no closer than I was then. The scope is so wide that I feel lost. I want to trust that ideas will come, but with an actual deadline and a topic that I so desperately want to do well by, I’m getting twitchy. Maybe that’s a sign that the idea I need is right around the corner. Or maybe it’s a sign that I need to change my approach. Or maybe it’s a sign that my clothes are making me itch, and lizards are invading from Mars.

I suppose I shouldn’t say I have no ideas. Rather, I have too many, but none of them seem to be any good. Much like turning to the Internet for medical advice, there must be something valuable in there, if I can figure out how to identify it buried in muck.

Good grief I’ve got too many projects. I’ve even gotten to the point where I have to have a projects page on our internal wiki to keep up with them all!

I’ve gotten (I think, crossing fingers) stable enough health- and emotion-wise to start trying to build my life up again, and the best way for me to keep from being miserable is to keep busy. The hard thing is that my health is variable and unpredictable enough that I’m very wary of committing to much of anything that has to be done in an absolute timeframe.

As I set up my business again, it has to be something that will pretty much run without me once I’ve got it running (or more accurately, will run with periodic, unscheduled bursts of activity when I can manage it).

Two other projects are in the ideation stage, with no deadlines other than when we run out of money and time to continue working on them.

The disability paper, again, no deadline. When I get it done is when I submit it for publication.

I have just signed up to teach next month’s Samadhi class on Thelemic ethics – so I have to put that together and teach it on a deadline, but the physical expenditures for that are pretty low. Work on my computer through the month, then sit in my living room in front of a bunch of friends on a particular evening and talk at them. And there are others who can jump in as backup if it turns out to be a really really bad day/week/month.

And, of course, doing art and blogging. Both “do when I can” things. Parenting and keeping the house running, both of which never stop but I have my husband for backup.

The most depression-inducing thing about all this has been feeling useless – like there’s nothing I can do that Makes a Difference because of my unreliable and resource-hogging nervous system. I’m hoping to establish enough variety in my ongoing projects that if I have a brain cell to spare past drooling on the couch there will be something that I feel like working on that does more than just kill time. Finding projects like this that don’t have deadlines has been a challenge, but I think I’ve finally got a pretty full slate. Hopefully not too full, but only time will tell.

It’s been over a month since I’ve posted any artwork.

In fact, it’s been over a month since I’ve even touched pen to paper (unless you count scribbling with markers beside my 3-year-old). My muse has been, not just silent, but the type of silence that muffles the ears and vibrates the air with its weight, the silence of a three-foot blanket of snow under a full moon.

And as much as I’ve tried to remind myself that it’s all part of my natural cycle, this has been a longer and deeper sleep than most. Not only was I not motivated to pick up my pens, but no images were floating in my head as I drifted to sleep. No striking shadows were catching my attention, begging me to consider how I would carve them in black and white. I wasn’t even feeling the restless itch that usually accompanies the fallow stage of my creative cycle, that itch that eventually explodes in a rush of messy, flailing, glorious inspiration.

At first it didn’t worry me. And then I was worried that I wasn’t worried. Was I losing myself? Was I leaving the artist behind? Who was I without that?

But in the last few days, my liminal spaces have started sprouting images again. The outline of a hand, a worried face peering through. A skull lit from within by a candle. I’m not ready to start drawing again yet, but I can see the light round the bend.

I am cranky.

And cranky in that particular way that tells me I should do art today or I will become a quivering depressive mess.

But inspiration? I has none.

Now, I am fully of the school that believes that art is at least as much hard work as it is inspiration; and inspiration isn’t even intrinsically necessary to create good art; however, when I’m in this kind of a mood and I try to force it, I will make myself into, again, a quivering depressive mess, because OMG I CANT DRAW WHY DID I EVER THINK I COULD CALL MYSELF AN ARTIST SHOOT ME NOW WITH GRAPHITE BULLETS

So basically I need to distract myself with shiny things until inspiration strikes. Maybe one of those shiny things will be the inspiration. Who knows.

*sigh*

The creative fog may be lifting, ironically as the fog outside descends in the midst of a glorious Midwestern thunderstorm. (Gods, I’ve missed thunderstorms. They don’t make ‘em on the West Coast.)

And interestingly, I can trace the path of origin of my current idea, partly thanks to my last post:

how I could visually communicate this feeling of walking through a dream, of the constant pull to blissful, quiet sleep….. The colors and lines will soften; the focus will blur; it will be a door to a different world, shimmering in and out of existence.

And lo and behold, a photo pops up on one of my friends’ blogs that communicates that dreamy feeling. That face in the foreground in my graphic pen&ink style, hair wrapping out and around turning into swirls of translucent color….. my friend graciously gave me permission to use it as a model, and I sketched out that part of the piece yesterday.

The scary part is that the colors of this idea I can only see coming through in watercolor. Watercolor, my hated and feared medium. Every time I’ve tried watercolor, it’s turned into a mud puddle. But nothing else will get that kind of ethereal color that I want.

So I got a small watercolor set and am going to do some experimentation today. Wish me luck.

My major realization of yesterday had to do with how frustrated I am about how sleepy and tired I’ve been. Even when my painkillers are working, it makes it hard to function when all I want to do is go to bed.

My realization was (duh) that I am taking not one, not two, but *three* drugs that say “may cause drowsiness”. Just because I don’t get to the point where it’s unsafe for me to drive doesn’t mean that there’s not some cumulative effect.

It doesn’t solve the problem of the drowsiness, of course, but maybe I can stress about it a little less.

The secondary thought was the wondering how I could visually communicate this feeling of walking through a dream, of the constant pull to blissful, quiet sleep. It’s something that will have to percolate. The colors and lines will soften; the focus will blur; it will be a door to a different world, shimmering in and out of existence. Is this where I’m to go next?

We shall see.

*yawn*

In the continued search for new art ideas, I’m currently being plagued with ideas in hyper-realistic, illustrative styles; which while I could argue I have the technique to accomplish, I don’t have the patience for, certainly not with my current low level of endurance!

In my head are also plenty of images that do suit my current graphic style, but I’m uninspired by them. For the first time since I can remember I find myself not terribly interested in drawing female nudes. Or more specifically, the nude female form seems to no longer be enough in and of itself. I want it to be saying something, meaning something – but what? And how, without cluttering it up with symbols and background that take away from the clean, graceful lines that my current style is all about?

I suppose I am making several assumptions that are limiting my options here.

First, I’m assuming that I should be trying to stick with my current style; to build up enough of a body of work in it that I can think about going into business again.

And *that* assumes that I can and/or want to go into business again. To which I have to honestly say I don’t know. I certainly wasn’t having much luck with it before my injury. It was a constant source of stress, feeling like I should be pushing harder, not knowing where/how to push, feeling like I was faking it, being dishonest by calling myself a professional. There’s less of that now, though in its place is guilt for not having even the potential to contribute financially to my family, and shame at being reduced to “just” a housewife, and a disabled one at that.

On the plus side for staying with my current style is that it is something I can do with minimal supplies, in very small chunks of time, curled up on the couch to accommodate my back injury. I’m not sure what else I could physically do. I’m just happy to have found something, anything, that is still possible for me.

One part of me is reluctantly thinking that what I should do is just back off of art for now. Focus on creating my home, my garden, staying sane – though art has always been a crucial part of staying sane for me – and let the art return when it feels natural.

The thing I need to remember is that art does not just mean setting pen and ink to paper. It is even a founding tenet of this blog that art is as much about how you see the world and move through it as it is about what you do and create. Cultivating mindfulness and awareness. Being in my body and in my life. Art does not need to be on display or for sale to be real. Art is… is….

Art is about that which you cannot communicate in words.

And that means it can be whatever I need it to be. Right now I am very tangled up in learning how to live with my chronic pain without resenting and fighting it every moment of the day. At some point that will become visual art, I’m sure, but in order for that to happen I must first find a way to integrate it all.

I’m still going to write. It may be more about my family and my house than what I’m drawing for a while. But it’s all about how I see. How to be an artist of living, a living artist.