Sailing into the fog
Notes on the gentle art of persistence
Hello friends
I’ve just started on a new big painting. Feelings of trepidation and hope always accompany the start of such an undertaking. My process is a slow one. It will take me a long time to finish it and I have no guarantee that the result will be successful.
At the moment it’s lying on my workbench with a first wash of colour that I already suspect is a false start that will need lots of reworking. But I can’t procrastinate, nor can I dither over it for too long. There’s a deadline to meet and an exhibition in a fancy city venue, showing the results of a painting award I feel I have to show I deserve, and demonstrate that I’ve made good use of it. And I must also be immensely grateful for this opportunity I’ve been given, that so many others, some of them my friends, also fulsomely deserve. I must stop whining and rise to the occasion.
I have such grand aspirations for this painting that I embarrass myself with them. With a working title of ‘haar’ (sea fog), I’ve made some smaller iterations, but really it’s more of a sensation than a visual prompt I’m working from. I want it to be an enfolding thing, a shimmering depth, a moment of stillness and wonder. I want it to roll over the viewer with the glimmering enchantment of fog over water, or of flying through a cloud. I want it to make them feel something, to be taken out of themselves for a few minutes and returned to their day lighter somehow.
I feel like stating these things will sound vainglorious and certainly jinx the whole endeavour. I’ll end up with a big grey blob of nothing much, or something that looks just like a Formica worktop. It could happen. I could spend the next 6 weeks working every hour on this painting and fail. In fact, given the height of my aspirations for it, failure is, more or less, a given.
How do we go on? How do we hold such fine hopes for our creative work, give it so much of ourselves, our time, our money, our deepest and most vulnerable self, with so little guarantee of any kind of return? It can all start to feel so heavy.
I’ve been here before. This in itself is some consolation.
Others have been here too, and I lean into them for support.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s delightful Ted Talk is always a tonic at such times. Recognising that after ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, it was likely that her greatest success was already behind her at 40, she realised that to keep being creative, she had to let go of ideas of success and failure. Or rather, redefine them in a way that was sustaining rather than paralysing.
Gilbert went back to Ancient Greece and Rome and found wisdom in their belief that creativity came not from the individual artist but from a divine attendant spirit, a daemon, a genius, a muse. For the ancients, it was this capricious, magical, divine entity, not the artist, that was the source of creativity.
Seeing creativity as the work of an elusive divine spirit lets you, the artist, off the hook. If it’s good, you can’t take the credit. If it’s a disaster, or worse, just meh, that’s not your fault either. Gilbert argues here that the artist’s job is just to turn up and be ready if and when the genius spirit comes and then faithfully transcribe whatever it brings.
And so it remained through the medieval period until the Renaissance changed this and put the individual human at the centre. Creativity came from the individual self, and the word genius began to be used to refer to a human (male, white) individual, rather than a divine spirit.
It’s a lot of responsibility and pressure to put on one human psyche. No wonder we feel we can’t live up to it.
John Cage was still a young composer when he too began to struggle with the idea that art was meant to be a vehicle for the self-expression of an individual genius.
On the verge of giving up altogether, the epiphany for Cage came from studying classical Hindustani music with the Indian musician Gita Sarabhai. Sarabhai told Cage that in the Indian classical tradition the function of music was not to express some individual experience, but to ‘sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences’.
When he then learned that this same idea had prevailed in early European music traditions, Cage rejected the Renaissance notion of the perfectible individual human at the centre of creativity, along with the Romantic ideal that art should give expression to turbulent emotion. Instead he longed for an art of tranquility, art that offered a healing release from the temporary emotions, art that carried a ‘shining aura of peace’.
If we are to keep going as artists, we have to learn how to be resilient. Letting go of the feeling that success or failure is all down to us, lightens our load.
To be reconciled that it’s not entirely up to you, that it’s not all about you, that you’re in service to something else, offers us freedom and a sense of lightness. It’s not such a big deal. We just keep showing up in a spirit of service and diligence. The daemon, the genius, the divine influence, mercurial and elusive as it may be, can do the rest, if it chooses.
So, don’t be afraid. Go on, sail on into that fog of uncertainty. Keep going, keep putting words down, painting, drawing, making. If you don’t sail into transcendent beauty but end up grounded on the rocks of plodding mediocrity, at least you’ll know it’s not your fault. The divine genius didn’t turn up to guide you.
And if you do create something that carries a ‘shining aura of peace’? Well, that’s not about you either.
Join the Life Raft Co-Working Session
Let’s set sail into the fog together! Join our creative co-working session every Wednesday from 3 pm to 4.30 pm UK time.
For those regulars who missed last week here’s a link to the recording below. To keep our co-working sessions feeling like the lovely safe and protected space we’ve created together, I’m only going to share the link with paid subscribers from now on, and delete the recording after a fortnight. I hope you understand. If you’re a regular Life Rafter and really can’t afford the sub, do let me know and I’ll sort you out.
That’s all for this week,
– Sam