Artists Passion

A mind is a terrible thing to waste. So too does it behoove us not to identify with our thoughts. We are so much more than our minds. And yet for the artist as with all other professionals, the mind is a highly useful tool. We need it. But not often in the ways we think or have been led to believe.

The artist, most particularly, is continually grappling with not only how to best use her or his mind, when to employ skills only the mind, especially the rational mind is best or singularly suited for, but when and where to unleash the mind’s skills. For a large part of the time, the artist’s job is to cultivate and nurture creativity, which means satiating our minds with mindless tasks, calming and removing it from the playground of our imaginations where our inner children or muses, as we say, have free reign unfettered by concerns of being attacked at the most inopportune moment, say like when it is about to deliver us a jewel, most likely presenting itself in the clothes and images that stir our fears and anxieties. Fears and anxieties are enemies of the mind.

The mind likes order, as it should. Spontaneous occurrences disrupt the routine flow of things. But creativity is about messiness, abrupt changes in the moment. If our work is to move our readers, those who study our paintings, hear our music, muse over our sculpting(s) or glasswork, our creations must be endowed with pieces of our soul. Excavation of the soul touches the very essences of our individual identities that inherently relate and are connected to, if not reflected by, and are wound, in our fears.

How do we settle the mind? What are the koans of mindless tasks that disengage our thoughts from themselves and reflect to us on an experiential level our primal identity as humans who happen to be artists? And once in that no-mind state, what do we do? What are we capable of accomplishing?

The cloud of unknowing is a place that many have labored over centuries to discern, and the paths leading to it. Once there, the experiences are as varied as those who reached it. A koan is an oxymoron, if you will, one hand clapping, that in contemplating the image defies the mind’s reasoning, and in so doing causes the thoughts to fall short in defining it, at least in rational, objective terms, and rest. But what about in subjective terms?

This is when the mind must kneel as servant to the process of which it is not the empirical ruler. This is when the sandy beach of ego must and does give way to the ocean of experiences that deliver us our stories, songs, interpretations of music, and grand images around which our paintings center and move us in manifesting them in a form that others can experience, and that will effect them in some, however subtle, yet profound way.

To move and draw emotions from others, we as artists must render ourselves vulnerable to our work at least in the beginning. During the first drafts of a story, as writers, we must suspend judgment and pour the contents of the kitchen sinks of our hearts onto the page. This is not an egocentric task. About the only thing the mind can do here is take dictation. The same holds true when starting a painting. The mind’s job is to follow orders. “Dip the brush into the blue paint. Bring the brush to the canvas and made broad, horizontal strokes.�? It could be as simple as, “Paint big, red circles.�? The mind directs the hand to do that until the unconscious reveals yet another task. During this time the artist cannot be concerned with nor deterred by what the mind thinks of these tasks and what following them yields both physically and externally or subjectively and internally— emotionally. Thoughts and phrases such as “Ooooh, I don’t like that. It’s ugly. Didn’t you paint that before? I liked the other one better. Those red circles won’t sell,�? only serve as markers indicating we are on the right path. That we must continue forward, stay with the feelings, go deeper into the anxieties by continuing to paint, play the notes, write the words that so stir and unsettle the mind.

These kinds of statements don’t effect me when I’m painting as when writing. But then crafting fiction is my primary art form. As a newly published author, my initial work has set a standard by which I myself can begin, if not careful, to judge later works. The mind knows this. In moments of danger or perceived threat such as when facing something new, the unknown of a new story as in the first drafts, these statements, and more, abound.

The bad company of the mind’s judgmental thoughts comprises and present the writer with what Edith Wharton suggests is the unique challenge to the literary artist.

She says, “To re-present in words is far more difficult, because the relation is so close between model and artist. The novelist works in the very material out of which the object he is trying to render is made. He must use, to express soul, the signs which soul uses to express itself. It is relatively easy to separate the artistic vision of an object from its complex and tangled actuality if one has to re-see it in paint or marble or bronze; it is infinitely difficult to render a human mind when one is employing the very word-dust with which thought is formulated.�? “The Writing of Fiction The Classic Guide to the Art of the Short Story and the Novel,” p. 16,

For this reason, as a writer, I paint to bring my mind to a state of forgetting itself relinquishing the thoughts that keep it comfortable and afloat, or affirm it as empirical rule of my art and my life. Painting is my way, my path to enter the cloud of unknowing where I abandon thoughts and enter a state of feeling, and experiencing myself without judgment. While painting I reconnect with that part of me that belies the word-dust with which the thoughts of my stories are formulated, and I connect with the true nature of my being and my purpose in life. Basking in that koan of the mindless mind, thoughts disintegrate in the task of bringing brush to paint and then to canvas. My imagination is unleashed. The inner child of my most authentic self descends to play, and delivers the stories of my heart that express my soul’s deepest yearnings and beliefs.