Artist

It (creativity) is both deliberate and uncontrollable, mindful and mindless, work and play.

         Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, Wired to Create

 

The Artist has a relationship with Inspiration (often personified as the Muse, who holds her softly and speaks into her ear). There is Power here, but Inspiration is not a force that forces an outcome. When inspired, she listens to what is not apparent, to a reality that exists in another dimension, while, at the same time, she listens to her own Heart. The Artist is here and there and in all places at once. Not because she is scattered, but because Artists are that open. Because art must be this and that and more. Whatever needs to be.

So, we envision a creature of the wilderness, wild, in a landscape quite different from commercial “plants” where alienation is manufactured. Always, when she is engaged in her Work, she is part of Nature, immersed and yet separate. Creativity separates and integrates aspects that can seem like opposites, contraries, polarities, divisions. Indeed, she allows herself to be a vehicle for creativity to use her, speak through her, and yet she speaks who she is, a very special construction of her history and memories, a unique bio-psycho-social-spiritual being-in-the world.

Why this painting?

We continue with our story, moving from Awakened Child to Artist. So, what is happening? What is this transition? Simply put, we’re changing our central focus from what is developing internally. We are now perceiving more of the external world; this is a real division (inner and outer) that we acknowledge and differentiate. As we heal and grow, eventually these aspects of being-in-the world will find a higher unity, a wholeness, a time when we can more seamlessly move between different dimensions of our experience.

Child to Artist might be considered (if we speak in metaphor) two stages of a heathy and Inspired life fully lived. Moving to Artist from Child, we take Mindfulness with us into the world and learn to Flow.

A developmental research term scaffolding seems apt here; it is a description of how parents can assist an infant learning to walk, by lightly holding their tiny fingers, when they stand, steadying them. Artists find a scaffolding as they are embraced by Inspired energies, and, too, can benefit from the scaffolding provided by other creatives, mentors, who give them a boost to a greater height, a lift to become more fully formed Artists—the flowering of Homo-aestheticus.

Later, in contrast to the Child and Artist, when we explore the Fallen World, we will find characters who are very different. Their inner and outer divisions lack an Inspired unifying force. They are patch-work constructs of the unconscious, masked agents wielding neuro-gravitational forces. These powers become devilish, upending our hopes and dreams.

The Artist

To truly innovate, she must learn to follow her desire path, to set her unique goals, and to follow through. Most of us are just dilettantes in many things, but the Artist continues, until she finds her path.

Of course, there are those who are a slave to toil. That’s not the Artist. Vocation can take on the quality of a demand or drudgery, and sometimes a job becomes jail. But people who Work, in the Loving way I mean it here, may spend a lot of time devotedly toiling without any result that seems useful to society or to a career. But they are about something that has importance to them. The true Artist is an embodied creation of Inspiration in the world and answers the question, “What is worth doing?”

Work

Artisans become devoted to their materials, the woodworker for instance is intimate with the grains and textures and subtle colors of wood, inhaling the smell of pine and birch and spruce, knowing the differences from the inside out. Massaging the roughness, sanding, polishing until the grains bristle, woodworkers carry the turpentine, the stains, the polyurethanes as emotional memories.

To any Inspired Artist the smells and tastes and textures and visuals, the physiology of the craft, are important, be it an apparent art medium, or the craft of lawyering, or doctoring or waiting tables.

Her immersion allows clarity—though not all at once; usually only by increments and approximations does she gain awareness. Some Work may take a lifetime, and, even then, she may make only a little progress. Some Work is the task of evolution, taking many generations.

I’m not, of course, attempting to describe any real artist. Many creatives are, to be honest, too ego driven and only partly motivated by Inspiration. In our Upside-down society, they also must find a schtick that sells. If they want to eat, they put something together with one eye on the marketplace. So, as I mean it here, the Artist is not a specific job title or an activity. Obviously, not all of us create things that resemble traditional works of art. Not everyone can paint or sculpt or design fashion. Not everyone harbors a desire to do a task easily recognized as artistic in this culture. But that’s not relevant to the core of what we’re describing.

Everyone has the potential to step into a state of flow, animated by Loving-Work, and like the awakened Child become some manifestation of the Artist, an invented vehicle, a Self-Inspired construction.

Capacity of the Artist: Negative Capability

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant.

We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Albert Einstein

In the Mindfulness of the Awakened Child, we can develop Dual Awareness and eventual Integration. This allows us to stay connected but separate (differentiated) from the Abnormal, our Pain and our Self-deception.

Similarly, in the Flow of the Artist, we have the potential for developing life-changing capacities. Consider what John Keats called negative capability, when we’re “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”  He believed such an attitude and ability allowed for meaningful creation. It keeps us from falling out of flow into misery, self-doubt, and blame and irritable reaching.

Negative Capability is the antidote to the frantic ego energy that can stall our Work. In Negative Capability we recognize the obstacles that arise around us, but we trust uncertainties. As we maintain a daily practice and trust even when we start to lose Loving-work energies, then we have an ability (some of the time) to stay connected enough to make a shift back to the flow or to interrupt what is interrupting. Also, we cease to put energy into what is self-defeating (some of the time), intuiting dead ends, trusting that the barriers to our Truth and Beauty will give way. Thus focused, an Artist armed with this capacity of Negative Capability becomes adept at heavy lifting. What was difficult becomes more self-rewarding and intrinsically motivating. We see deeper and discover more. The window of tolerance grows in our Work. The Inspired Self manifests more through us. We grow more vibrant, resilient, and dynamic in our efforts.

Soul?

What makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making, something risky, something human. Art is not in the eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist.        

Seth Godin, The Icarus Deception

Creating our art is important work. The Artist is par excellence the person who works to develop her perception into form, her insight into vision; and art is a technique of communicating something that’s experienced as purposeful. I believe that Inspiration presses us all to learn a craft, or many crafts, to engage in activities that manifest our awareness. But this requires more than Inspiration striking us in the middle of the night. It demands discipline without guarantee of social or financial reward. Though there are also rewards.

There’s the potential, if not often realized, to do something that touches another, reveals something that the world has not seen so clearly before:

• Art protects us against the sense that we don’t belong here and that we’re not worthy.

• Art transforms Nature into our home.

• We learn to see differently.

• Fulfillment arises from the toil we know is worthy of our time and, ultimately, worthy of life.

As we engage in creative efforts, when our art becomes a dominant force, Beauty has a greater pull than pain, and Truth a greater pull than self-deception. It is now that the Artist can consider the question, “Where am I going?”

The Muse in Loving-work

I can idealize this. I can imagine I was destined to come to rely on my Artist inner voice, destined as an Arthurian knight is to adventure, going where I had to go, into places of action and activity, on the dramatic and creative path. But, honestly, in my early life, I recall only an incremental dawning that a Muse could be a reliable ally. Indeed, it seemed, the Muse, or Muses, or Daimon, or call it what you will, was giving away its blessings. But why didn’t anyone talk about this? No one talked of a creative companion accessible to me, certainly not in my public school.  What I do recall is that when homework required some artistry, I could put the assignment away in the background of my mind, pushed across the corpus collosum perhaps or tucked back in the right-brain somewhere. Later, I would check back to the foreground of consciousness to see what showed up. It was a kind of magic.

I was not the smartest or the most athletic or in any way popular, but this was something I could claim, this recognition of the magic. There were insights that just came, revealed themselves, assisted me in putting together something new. Why did no one talk of the wizardry of this?

As an angst-ridden teen, when writing poetry, I relished moments when the right words would come out onto the page without conscious struggle. Sometimes ideas would form while napping, shifting from sleep to wake into an “aha” moment. I learned that I could frequently invite this force by entering into an alert but relaxed and expectant frame of mind. A trance almost. I came to discover that painting responded to this frame of mind and offered a similar supernatural power and a sense of flow much like those earliest moments of pen to paper, though claiming visual art as important came much later to me. In my family, visual art was even less appreciated than poetry. And certainly no one mentioned a Muse.