This is not a competition

It's an invitation

Dear Friends

Reading books about creativity certainly doesn’t replace the graft and patience needed to actually sit down to do it week after week after week. But reading about the experiences of other artists, writers, musicians and makers can help us to feel like we’re part of something bigger. It can remind us that others have walked this path before and will come after. We are part of a shared creative endeavour. In our individualised culture it’s easy to lose sight of this. We can become disconnected and discouraged.

The Creative Act on my studio work bench

Recognising that any creative act is essentially a collective one lies at the heart of Rick Rubin’s recent book “The Creative Act: A Way of Being.” As a music producer of prodigious output, Rubin’s creativity has often found its highest expression in facilitating others. He has collaborated with some of the biggest names in the music industry. He’s produced so many legendary albums that he’s become something of a legend himself. But he declines any claims to individual genius.

In fact he goes further:

Nothing begins with us.

The more we pay attention, the more we begin to realize that all the work we ever do is a collaboration.

It’s a collaboration with the art that’s come before you and the art that will come after. It’s also a collaboration with the world you’re living in. With the experiences you’ve had. With the tools you use. With the audience. And with who you are today.

Life is short. We come and go. But:

Every work, no matter how trivial it may seem, plays a role in the greater cycle. The world continually unfolds.

Any ‘creative act’ is a natural expression of the unfolding universe. This is a humility that is both liberating and grandly inspiring. In our individual creativity we are bright, fleeting sparks in a story so vast and magnificent we can scarcely imagine it.

Alongside this humility, Rubin advocates another old-fashioned virtue. Patience.

There are no shortcuts.

Patience is developed much like awareness. Through an acceptance of what is. Impatience is an argument with reality. The desire for something to be different from what we are experiencing here and now. A wish for time to speed up, tomorrow to come sooner, to relive yesterday, or to close your eyes and open them and find yourself in another place.

Time is something we have no control over.

When it comes to the creative process, patience is accepting that the majority of the work we do is out of our control.

This means that, for all our striving:

We can’t force greatness to happen. All we can do is invite it in and await it actively. Not anxiously…simply in a state of continual welcoming.

Rubin sets his collaborative vision of creativity against the grinding competitiveness of our atomised, capitalist, striving culture:

Some may argue that competition inspires greatness. The challenge of exceeding what others have accomplished can act as an incentive to push our creative limits. In most cases, though, the energy of competition oscillates at a lower vibration.

When another great work inspires us to elevate our own, however, the energy is different. Seeing the bar raised in our field can encourage us to reach even higher. This energy of rising-to-meet is quite different from that of conquering.

Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys told the story that when he first heard The Beatles’ album Rubber Soul, ‘I was so happy to hear it that I went and started writing God only Knows’. Paul McCartney, in turn, was reduced to tears by Wilson’s song, and the album it came from Pet Sounds. Listening to the Beach Boys’ album inspired The Beatles to create their own album to match its greatness: Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.

Rubin says of this example:

Being made happy by someone else’s best work, and then letting it inspire you to rise to the occasion, is not competition. It’s collaboration.

This creative back-and-forth wasn’t based on commercial competition, it was based on mutual love. And we are all the beneficiaries of this upward spiral toward magnificence.

Great art is an invitation, calling to creators everywhere to strive for still higher and deeper levels.

So let’s not be discouraged by another artist’s wonderful work or another writer’s great success. Let’s be happy their work is in the world and that we have been enriched and inspired by it.

We are all working together. We glean from each other. We support each other. We learn from each other. We inspire each other. Like trees in a wood, we flourish together.

Jeannine Ouellette

addressed a similar topic this week, here addressing writers, but applicable to all kinds of creative endeavour. She writes:

Sometimes, people have failures of generosity in their literary citizenship because they believe that since writing is so competitive, it is a competition. This is a grave mistake. Writing is not a competition. It is a holy creative act through which we remake ourselves and the world and it should be treated as such.

The work of creativity is not a competition.

It’s a grand and inspiring collaboration across hundreds of centuries and thousands of miles.

The Life Raft Co-Working Sessions

And while we’re on the subject of collaboration, this week’s Life Raft Co-Working session will gather on Zoom at 3pm today (Wednesday) as always. You are welcome to come and join this lovely, warm, supportive group. We open with a bit of brief chat, share what we’ll be working on, and then carry on in convivial quiet until around 4.15 pm, when we reconvene to share a little and say goodbye till next week. The link is the same each time so you can bookmark and save it.

Join the Lifebuoy Chat

Now you can share images, text, video and keep the conversation going between our sessions. I’ve had to make this chat for paid subscribers only, to keep the sense of a community space. But if a paid sub really isn’t possible for you right now, let me know.

Your art in your words

I was delighted to get such positive feedback on the webinar Writing as a Visual Artist that I gave for ArtUK last week. I’m so pleased that it was useful, practical and is already helping many participants see some of the many ways that writing can help their visual art practice to flourish. I couldn’t see participants as it was a webinar format, but I do know that 150 of you signed up! If you subscribed to The Life Boat because you attended or watched the replay, do drop me a message to say hello. I’d love to know what you found useful, and what you’d like me to focus on for future webinars or online workshops. All feedback is gratefully received!

If you want to learn how to write confidently about your art work or get ready to make those all-important applications there are still places available on my online course with 1:1 support over the summer.

Thank you, as always, for being part of The Life Boat crew. Paid subscriptions help keep this little ship afloat and I am grateful for every single one. But I know that they can add up. So you can also support my work by ‘liking’, commenting or sharing, using the buttons at the bottom or top of this email. It really helps new readers find their way here.

Until next week!

– Sam