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| Painting by Bill Scott |
Yesterday in class we talked about approaching art-making from an emotional perspective. We discussed, as a group, using our emotions with our art and creating strategies to do it. Hopefully, this practice will help you go deeper into your imagination and will help develop a stronger artistic process.
Developing our emotional selves will incite a more profound hunger for if, and when, the fundamentals are ever needed. Invest more intention in the emotional evolution of oneself and have it be a source of inspiration. It is my advice to you after myself having had experienced these failures personally in my career as an artist. It will help guide you in your process as an artist and you will experience a more profound journey. You will create a better line of questioning so that you may dive more deeply into your creative self. And ironically, it will render better art by paying less attention to technical skill and more attention to the emotional self.
Often I find, this emotional approach to art-making a commonly avoided one. Perhaps, technical skill is easier to obtain than dealing with our complicated emotions about things. Maybe this is why many of us ignore the difficulty altogether and preoccupy ourselves with what's easier. Perhaps it's easier to objectively observe and represent the physical world only as it is, than it is to deal with our messy inner emotions about how we perceive ourselves.
Look, technical skill is pretty simple, to an extent. The more you do something the more you get at it, through repetition. It, in a way, will develop itself as long as you simply just keep doing it – hence, the catchy Nike slogan, "just do it.". Well...that's not to say you shouldn't be thoughtful when doing something. Being thoughtful could have helped Nike out with their campaign. That's ok, we'll use it for us artists, "Just be thoughtful". [Sorry, I digress.]
Repetition may work for technical acuity, however the same does not apply to figuring out how to develop as an emotional painter. So elusive is emotional intelligence these days, that many of us haven't even heart of the subject. Well then, I suppose it really is the burden of the artists to teach the rest of the population about who we really are.
Understanding your emotional self as a creative artist takes time and quite a bit of on-going self reflection. But if you stick with it, you'll have a better chance at understanding who you are, your authentic self. And your art will be loads better. You'll learn that your emotions and vulnerabilities as a person are important art making tools. And best of all, your focus won't be on how to go about marketing yourself, making money or how to impress your piers. Your concerns might shift from acquiring technical skill, toward something of much greater use to humanity – how to live your life and how to improve the quality of experience within it.
It may also be helpful to dispel any preconceived notions we may have about ourselves or who we think we may be as artists. In other words, allow ample room for the notion that we may not know fully who we are as artists – as we don't see ourselves as objectively as we should. Getting to know one’s expression is a lifelong task. The whole point is to express yourself as a human being. If identifying as an artist complicates the matter for you, then don't self identify with the title, artist. Simplify the matter and don't call yourself anything, be without titles. Doing just this thing might help you be that much less self-aware.
Socrates said, "An unexamined life is not worth living." Perhaps, as artists, by examining ourselves more deeply, we are getting closer to realizing how critical this quote really is. Perhaps this is the purpose to art – to help us better know our emotions, which in-turn get us to better know ourselves. Maybe all we are are expressions. Know thyself.
Formulate your feelings from your experiences, make visual sense of them the best you can, then find the appropriate means to express it.
Emotional Awareness –> Visual Intelligence –> Creative Intelligence
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Opening-up Your Creativity – Creating helpful strategies to tap in to the emotional side of art-making (surmised by our group discussion, 5/17/18):
Please feel free to add to this running list as it may occur to you (you can write your comments in the comment section below each blog post). This is in no way academia, it is simply our educated opinions based on our being human. I’ll post them on the student blog and periodically update it.
scumblings.blogspot.com
I categorized the exercises in to two parts: Psychological and Physical.
Psychological
• Brake your currently exhisting loops and thought patterns. You know the ones. They often sounds like a broken record and hold you back from effectively resolving issues.
• Identify narratives we may have created for ourselves, all of them. Keep only the ones which work. Keep in mind, what may have been useful yesterday may no longer be useful today. Be truthful with yourself – make sense of what thoughts are positive and negative, and what's useful and what’s not.
• Practice being in the moment when creating. You can’t do this if you’re painting for the future (hopes of where your art might go, or stuck in the past (your idea of who you think you are, idea of old self).
• Be very mindful of the language you use with yourself and others. Don’t be self defeating.
• Reject any negative thinking. Have zero tolerance with this.
• Positivity promotes creativity and negativity stifles it
• Be simple, it’s often easier said than done
• Get out of your own way
• Embrace change, change is good and acknowledge that you are always changing.
• Be purposeful and simple with what your ultimately trying to achieve, strive for richness and depth, and be authentic
Physical
• Make a list of subjects that have emotional power to you (relationships, mortality/death, disparity, extracting meaning from the mundane, portraiture, etc.)
• Write down a list of all the on-going projects you want to engage in. For example: a daily practice of drawing in your sketchbook, recording your dreams when you wake up, doing paintings from wooden blocks, paintings of chairs or houses or faces, daily drawing in sketchbook of paintings from artists who inspire you, paintings or drawings of your already existing photos, draw from pausing the DVD player (movies), write down and compile inspiring phrases, infusing mundane objects with emotion, etc.
• Practice activities which help you build authenticity. For me, it’s investing time in my studio, listening to music, organizing my mess, drawing in my sketchbook, writing, or being out in by nature and just spending time alone.
• Harboring your environment: Do things that build your own personal power, that make you feel joy and appreciation for being alive. Take note and write them down or draw pictures (notes to self). Use these feelings to express yourself creatively
• Meditation, yoga and exercise, all work. Focus your creative energy
• Express feelings through the way you see
• Thank your mind for sharing and come back to breath
• Learn to accept the accuracy of your mistakes. They are not mistakes at at, leave them, you’ll learn from them later. This takes the pressure off of performing. Think of other things you can do to make things informal. I feel, informal is more honest. I feel that drawing in my sketchbook is more honest than a fancy large canvas. I work to make my finished paintings as easy, free-flowing and honest as my idea that are in my sketchbook.
• Spend more time in the blocking-in or drawing phase of a painting. Stay abstract and imaginative, regardless of how representational or real you intend the painting to be at the final. Really explore this stage of the painting. Push your imagination and watch the abstract world of your imagination present itself. Let go. Let the brush troll around on the canvas and see what it reveals. Clear your mind. Look deeply in to your subject and abstract it. Try not to paint what you see too literally. If it looks like something, you’re not trying hard enough.
No fear, relax, all this can be painted over later or covered up at any time, or some of it can peek through and end up being part of the design of the final piece. Allow your mistakes to happen, let them be broadcast – make sense of them later. Let the next thing happen. Be authentic. Be yourself. Be imaginative and let your imagination guide you on this journey where time does not exist. Stop trying to paint the object so literally. Instead of reiterating the usual fundamentals in your head while you are painting, brake that loop and maybe instead ask yourself, “How do you feel, exactly? What do you like, why? How are you going to use your brush (or whatever else) to best express these things?”. What you have to say about something is often what makes it visually interesting.
