Where Does Creativity Come From?
Creative inspiration and flow is something I try to use in every aspect of my life not just in my painting. As a mom I use it to try to figure out answers to all of the bizare things that are pelted at me by my kids and pets...Why is the cat throwing up? What is causing my kid's toe to swell up,? How do I remove that mystery spot on the carpet that won’t go away? I try to always look for an “aha” solution from my inspiration when I don't find an easy answer on the Google. I use it when I am trying to visualize how I want things in my life to turn out. And I rely on creativity and inspiration when I try to create a piece of art that I have an urge to create. If everything is quiet and I'm rested and there are no calamaties happening or bills that need to get paid, being creative comes easily to me. My mind calms down, I don't feel pressure or doubt and I start to get excited about creating something new on a canvas and to have fun and play.
Unfortunately, my life tends to feel like I'm being pelted with tennis balls from an overactive ball machine most of the time as seeming emergencies and bills and deadlines loom. Just like most everyone, I start to worry about the future and commiserate about the past and wonder how am I going to get this or that done and the creative urge starts to wilt. That's the challenge I struggle with everyday. In the face of "real world adulting," how do I bring creativity, fun, inspiration and flow in even if just for a few hours per day and at the same time create something that looks and feels amazing? That's often a tall order it seems.
Where does my creativity come from? I believe my best creative work is not just something my brain comes up with. I feel as if it is channeled from somewhere else...maybe it's God or the field of consciousness or sometimes I feel as if my mom and grandmoms, who have all passed, are channeling their ideas, colors they love, themes that they like into my work to make it better. My mother's favorite color was turquoise and my best selling work has always included that fabulous color. According to Julia Cameron, the author of the book The Artist's Way, that if you think of your best creative work having actually already been created in the spirtual space it helps to take the fear out of the creative process. All you have to do as an artist is channel the work into existence. I think it feels a little better to think that great creative work isn't something that you have to make up from whole cloth but that you are channeling the work through you.
Nonetheless, I do tend to get stuck time to time when I just don't feel confident enough to create what I think I want to see. Those times are frustrating but I am learning how to use these periods to reach a higher level of performance despite my emotional rut. Maybe it means I take a class with an artist that I admire for a few days or weeks. Or maybe it means that I do something that is creative but not painting, like cooking up a batch of lavendar syrup from my garden's lavendar patch or doing some pencil sketches of optical illusion demos that I find in my Pinterest feed. All the while I always feel this deep urge to get back to painting but I know that stressing and pushing is not a habit I want to bring to my creative practice. I try to give myself a little bit of patience and grace as I grow in my art practice.
So I have found that creativity can't possibly come from my brain alone...I have tried and that's not where my “good stuff” or the artwork that I like and people want to buy comes from. I have found that a few things help me get to a creative flow state:
In order to turn off my worried and distracted brain, I have finally, after years of thinking I wasn’t really that good at doing meditation, just made myself build a meditation practice daily in order to calm my mind and body down on a regular basis. I didn’t do that for years and I had built up such a constant state of anxiety that for a while it took prescription drugs in order for me to rachet out of regular panic attacks when I was a professor. I decided when I quit academia that I didn’t want to continue using drugs to treat my brain. So I have worked over the last 4 years to become a regular meditator. I now try to meditate 3 or more times per day and it helps me weather my emotional ups and downs to get back to my creative center.
Because my business life and my home life will very easily take over every spare moment of my life if I don’t stop it, I book time on a regular if not daily basis to reserve for creative work that I want to do no matter what calamaties are going on. I don’t succeed in creating everyday but I try not to let more than a week go by without doing something creative.
When my son left home 2 years ago, I did something that wasn’t that popular but I took over his bedroom to create a space for my creating tools and reorganizing that space periodically. He was a little miffed that he no longer had squatter rights to his old room (I still clear it out for him when he visits us twice a year) but I was bold and took the opportunity to claim that much needed space for my “art studio.” I try to keep the clutter at bay even with a ton of brushes and dirty rags everywhere by stuffing everything into a box and putting it in the closet until I can get some time to look through it.
I have added a trick that Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way recommends: An Artist's Date once a week to do something without the kids or the dogs or anyone else that is just for me and my artistic spirit. It has to be fun and doesn’t have to be expensive, maybe an hour sitting in my local library looking through art books or maybe a splurge on a fruit smoothie and a walk through the park. I feel totally guilty beforehand because I’m so used to the kids and the pets having access to all of my time but I am getting slowly more used to giving myself this little gift once a week.
I also write morning pages everyday (another trick from The Artist Way) to dump the negative talk, worries, hidden blocks, anxieties, and doubts. That has helped prevent that overwhelming bottled up feeling when you are trying to get things done but inevitably face set backs and indecision.
Before I start a session, I take a moment to take a deep breath and visualize how it feels to create something amazing not necessarily what the creation is going to look like and then just waiting for the next step of what to do
Rather than relying on my “lying eyes” (it seems I am always ultra critical when I look at my own work especially during the “ugly duckling” creation process), I use my phone camera to take pictures of the work when I get stuck or worried so I don't see it through my eyes but I see it as if someone else created it. That tends to make me see it more gently and it actually tends to look better than my own eyes are telling me and I avoid making the mistake of painting over a work that actually has potential. That has saved a lot of successful pieces from being annhilated before seeing the light of day.
Something that I have found to be the oddest aspect of my creativity is that when I have create my most successful pieces, the ones that have sold and that people have loved the most, when I look back at how I created it, I often can't remember exactly how I did it. It is as if I went into an altered state during the process and something else took over the process. That kind of freaks me out a little...like where did I go and who else was driving the bus while I was gone? I like that it produces something admirable but I'm still not sure how to control that process or even how to get into that state. The creative process remains a mystery to me but I am making progress in finding ways to succeed creatively and nurture my precious artistic spirit.