8 Things for March; from the bravest thing we can say to inspiring creative reflections
Along with what makes the unhappiest man.
I believe the true gauge of good art is if it can help you express what is inside.
But, we all have dry spells when those inspiring things that urge our expression on, fall away for periods of time. Then something comes along in its own timing to inspire us back to our physical understanding of the mentally lived life.
From the substack of Austin Kleon I ended up at this video of a talk he did which led to this page of notes/ideas that got me back into creative action.
Like all art, we have this odd idea we know is false, that our first attempt needs to be the perfect one... whatever a perfect attempt in art or creative expression is.
Gary Panter tells us:
“You can make all kinds of rules for your art making, but for starting in a sketchbook, you need to jump in and get over the intimidation part — by messing up a few pages, ripping them out if need be. Waste all the pages you want by drawing a tic tac toe schematic or something, painting them black, just doodle. Every drawing will make you a little better. Every little attempt is a step in the direction of drawing becoming a part of your life.”
“Most people (even your favorite artists) don’t like their drawings as much as they want to. Why? Because it is easy to imagine something better. This is only ambition, which is not a bad thing — but if you can accept what you are doing, of course you will progress quicker to a more satisfying level and also accidentally make perfectly charming drawings even if they embarrass you.”
What makes The Unhappiest Man?
In 1843 thirty-year-old Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) wrote in Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Of all ridiculous things, the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.
In a later chapter, titled “The Unhappiest Man,” he considers how we grow unhappy by fleeing from presence and busying ourselves with the constant pursuit of some as-yet unattained external goal:
The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself. But one can be absent, obviously, either in the past or in the future. This adequately circumscribes the entire territory of the unhappy consciousness.
[…]
The unhappy one is absent… It is only the person who is present to himself that is happy.
Original Work?
There is no blank slate upon which works of true originality are composed, no void out of which total novelty is created. Nothing is original because everything is an influence; everything is original because no influence makes its way into our art untransmuted by our imagination. We bring to everything we make everything er have lived and loved and tessellated into the mosiac of our being. To be an artist in the largest sense is to be fully awake to the totality of life as we encounter it, porous to it and absorbent of it, moved by it and moved to translate those inner quickening into what we make.
Nick Cave
Our Constructions.
Nothing you create is ultimately your own, yet all of it is you. Your imagination, it seems to me, is mostly an accidental dance between collected memory and influence, and is not intrinsic to you, rather it is a construction that awaits spiritual ignition.
Your spirit is the part of you that is essential. It is seperate from the imagination, and belongs only to you. This formless pneuma is the invisible and vital force over which we toss the blanket of our imagination - that habitual mix of received information, of memory, of experience - to give it form and language. In some this vial spirit burns fiercely and in others it is a dim flicker, but it lives in all of us, and can be made stronger through daily devotion to the work at hand.
Nick Cave
Be like a crow by P Jean Oliver
Ok, just two more from The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy before I give them a rest.
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END