Intangible work is HARD work

It’s amazing to me how tiring intangible work like mental, emotional, and spiritual progress can be. After I finished yesterday’s post, I set a goal to spend as much time as I could in the studio before my sweetie got home from work at 6:30. Nothing else required, just spend time there and work to heal my artistic wounds by relearning how to be comfortable with my art. I folded laundry, read a magazine, thought, wrote down ideas, tidied up. By the end of the day I was exhausted; I sat on the couch, wrapped up in my favorite blanket, and cried. It wasn’t even a sad cry exactly, I just needed the emotional release. Later, after dinner, I took a cue from SARK and took a much-needed nap.

Despite how draining it is, it’s important work. I plan to continue to spend as much time in my studio as I can. It’s a little like telling a child who can’t fall asleep “Go to bed. You don’t have to sleep, you just have to rest.” You know that if they do, sleep will eventually follow. I don’t have to make art, I just have to get comfortable with being in my studio. Art will follow.

Intangible work involves fighting a daily war against the Ghosts of Criticisms past. Just thinking about creating art with the same kind of abandon as I did in high school makes a thousand whiny, critical voices in my head rear up with objections like “But what would you DO with all that artwork?” Our world is all about the tangible, the monetary, the useful. So the idea of churning out page after page of artwork seems hideously indulgent to my societal training. To the question “What would you do with all that art?” I am learning to shout back, “I WILL HEAL!” (And if the Ghosts still demand something more “sensible” I can tell them that I will give it away as gifts or sell it on Etsy.)

It seems that as the new year approaches, I’m not the only one thinking about the challenge of starting. After posting yesterday, I curled up with the latest issue of Cloth Paper Scissors and was delighted to find Nic Hohn’s article “Action is the Art of Doing”, which dealt with just the sort of issues I explored yesterday. The practical suggestions Nic offers only reinforce the idea that journalling could be a very productive tool for me. Later on, I was exploring SARK’s book Living Juicy: Daily Morsels for Your Creative Soul, which is set up to optionally be read one page per day, and found that the topic of the first week of pages is Procrastination. Is it the time of year to think about these things, or is it serendipity?

The image in this post is a painting I did in high school or middle school, that I finally got around to hanging today. Click on it to view a bigger version on Flickr.

Paralysed by too many artistic interests

How does a struggling artist… well, stop struggling? As a creative person whose interests skip giddily from one end of the spectrum to the next, how am I to ever “settle down”? I want to try EVERYTHING. I want to do everything, make everything. I am so overwhelmed by options and ideas that I rarely even create anymore. I walk into my studio and nearly go into a panic at all the projects left unfinished or even unstarted, all the techniques I want to try, all the avenues of creative learning I want to pursue. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to pick something and start, let alone follow through on multiple things.

I think this is a common problem among artists, as we tend to love learning, exploring, and playing. But I suspect that this paralysis I experience is somewhat particular to my own peculiar quirks. I mean, surely I’m not alone in this, but it seems to me that lots of artists who have difficulty settling on just one artistic pursuit can at least find the wherewithal to try things or start things, even if they struggle with finishing them or sticking to one field.

I suspect there are a variety of reasons I experience this inability to start. Firstly, I’m pretty solidly brainwashed by our commercially-driven society to believe that a person’s worth is defined by their income. God, it sounds horrible when I say it like that, and I don’t think I particularly judge others that way – but I’m incredibly down on myself for not making money. For not “being a productive member of society.” I have a hard time trying new things artistically because I’m constantly assessing the saleability of the potential end result. It’s hard to play and experiment when you’re bogged down worrying about the cost of the materials.

Then there’s the Asperger’s stuff. For starters, there’s the fact that one of my stronger Aspie traits is difficulty prioritizing. How do I just pick an interest and dig in when I find the phrase “just pick something” so scary? (And, in fact, pretty nonsensical – to me there is no “just” about picking something.) I’m also the sort of person that tends to get trapped between fear of success and fear of failure. While this is by no means a problem exclusive to those on the autistic spectrum, I believe this is rooted in an Aspie way of thinking in my case. It’s a problem-solving issue; I’m scared to try things because I’ll be faced answering the question “What next?” It’s worth noting that my fear of failure is worse than my fear of success due to my fairly screwed up relationship with money. I can’t shake the feeling that if I wreck a piece I’ve wasted the materials, and to my Damn-Yankee mind wasting anything is a mortal sin.

All this comes back to something I’ve been thinking about more and more lately, which is that I should work on creating some sort of routine or ritual that incorporates journalling and or affirmations. I need to work on retraining my brain in healthier directions, and although I tend to get my mental hackles up at seemingly new-agey notions like affirmations, I think I need to try and push past that impulse. After all, the reason I feel this way is year of thinking things like “Trying new things is scary” and “What can’t I make money? I’m such a loser!” These are affirmations too, just destructive ones.

Having worked through a lot of my feelings and theories on the subject, my next step is to go sit in my studio for a while. I’d like to see if I can play a bit, but for now I just want to work on being comfortable in there. One step at a time.

Starting again, again

Well, my clever plan to post daily and build a habit of blogging didn’t work as planned. As I mentioned in my previous post, my computer promptly had issues which made posting regularly problematic. By the time things were smoothed out with that my seasonal depression was flaring up further, and the holidays made things busy-busy-busy. This year’s Christmas was epically stressful, and not for any one reason. My partner and I spent the three hour drive drive back from Western Massachusetts discussing why things were so stressful this year. As far as I can tell, none of the issues we identified were any different that previous years, they just caused even more stress than they usually do. We’ve spent a lot of the last couple days planning and shopping and organizing, in an attempt to not only take the stress out of the holidays from now on, but where ever possible replace the stressful problems with meaningful traditions.

For example, a lot of our family’s Christmas stress stems from people staying up late on Christmas Eve frantically wrapping. Many of us are spatially-challenged and perfectionists, so trying to wrap gifts when we are overtired and and on a deadline can easily bring us to the brink of tears. This stressful situation is compounded by a few family members being early risers, and we have a late night of panicked gift-wrapping and then a long morning of people trying not to be impatient waiting for the last-minuters to crawl out of bed. The plan for heading off this stressful scenario and reshaping it into a fun tradition is to host a Wrap Party at our apartment in early to mid December.

Having a party well in advance of Christmas will give everyone a whole day to get it done at a leisurely pace. A more complex problem to solve was making it easier on those of us who find gift-wrapping difficult due to perfectionism, a poor sense of spatial-relations, and so on. So we hit Target’s after-Christmas clearance and stocked up on value packs of gift bags, tape, stick-on bows, and yarn and wired ribbon which tie much easier than curling ribbon. Then we took a trip to The Container Store for rolls of wrapping paper; they have some with a grid printed on the back for a cutting guideline. When we mentioned to a salesperson that we were looking for that type, she even pointed us to a tool for cutting wrapping paper that looked so handy that we bought two. We also bought a container to store giftwrap, since the paper grocery bag we used last year was seriously not cutting it. All in all, it looks like we’re well on our way to transforming one of the biggest Christmas stresses in our family into a pleasant get-together.

We have some other ideas like this, and we’re trying to do as much like this as possible. Rather than trying to simply eliminate stressful situations, we’re looking for ways to turn them into something not just less-stressful but actively relaxing. This got me thinking about my ongoing struggles with identity and feeling at peace with myself and my place in the world. It seems to me that I should see if there are similar things I can do in my daily life, and in my mental space. So rather than approaching this blog like an obligation and making rules for how often I must post, I’m going to try and look at this blog as a sanctuary. Somewhere I can go to work through issues, explore ideas, and watch my progress as I find my path. That was the sentiment I was going for in my post “Making myself at home” but I got caught up in destructive language ‘challenge’ and ‘work’. These words shouldn’t have to be destructive, and I want to work on (oops, there it is again!) making them safer words for me. I want to learn how to keep from putting up mental defenses and feeling panicked by words like those. In the meantime, I’ll try looking at the same idea with kinder eyes; so I’m going to try to visit this blog and share my progress as regularly as is comfortable and healthy for me. I still hope that that with be fairly often, but time will tell.