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On
Writing The
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Artist's Way How
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It seems like a bizarre question – how can anyone be too happy to write or paint or sculpt or make music? Perhaps you meet someone and fall in love, land a job you can feel passionate about, or find an activity that makes you feel energised – and suddenly you don’t feel like leaving that newfound happiness for the loneliness of the computer screen or easel.
For many artists, escaping into a dream world where we are one with our work, or creating a fictional universe where we make the rules, is a way to make an unhappy life easier to cope with. If your life is miserable it can be extremely satisfying to immerse yourself in a character’s love life or wild adventures. It can even help to bury yourself in the expression of something or someone worse off than you are, so that the world you come back to doesn’t seem so bad, or so that you can draw strength from someone stronger than you are.
Even using art to confront unhappiness can help. Shaping a sculpture into something that mirrors the darkness inside can help to get it out of yourself and into the open. Many artists use material from their own lives as inspiration for their work.
I’m going to use the term “negative motivation” to describe this use of art to escape or fix something that is “missing” in an artist’s life. It’s not meant to be a judgement that the practice is “negative” or “bad”, but rather a term similar to the use of negative space in a painting. Positive motivation is when you are inspired by something to create an artwork; negative motivation is when you are inspired by a lack of something to explore it, or escape from it, in art.
So what happens if this negative motivation is removed? It becomes too easy to find enjoyment in someone else’s art – to pick up a book or watch a movie – and your need to create your own statement is much less apparent. Probably because you’re too busy enjoying – living – your life.
One step you can take is to listen to what your heart wants you to enjoy when doing something else seems more fun than picking up a paintbrush. Is your work weighing too heavily on you now that your heart is lighter? What would happen if you literally “lightened up”?
Sometimes it’s not easy to change the focus of a project if it was commissioned when you were feeling differently to the way you do now. You may have an investment in keeping pain and difficulty close to your work so that you can represent it accurately. This doesn’t mean you have to live the pain you’re representing. Leave it on the canvas, and remind yourself to be glad that you can go home after a hard day’s work and be happy.
Ask yourself what you set out to achieve when you first started creating. If you can find a deeper reason to keep at it, you can use it to motivate yourself again, positively.
copyright © Elsa Neal 2006 (Please contact the
for permission to reprint this article.)
Recommended:
Try these books if you need some advice about how to deal with your feelings and their relation to your art:
The War of Art - Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, by Steven Pressfield, is available from Amazon.com
Living With Feeling : The Art of Emotional Expression, by Lucia Capacchione, is available from Amazon.com
The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, is available from Amazon.com
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