Mysterious Flame

I’m sure you know Paul McCartney as a singer and song-writer. But did you know the ex-Beatle also paints?

A few years ago, I got the book Paul McCartney: Paintings. He does these big, expressive, semi-abstract pieces that have a sort of visceral effect, with lots of drips and runs. Very much influenced by Willem de Kooning’s abstract expressionism.

With all his talent, even Paul McCartney can get stuck. In Paintings, he shares a fun, creative little strategy he has devised for dealing with stuckness. Read the rest of this entry »

Note: This is a piece I published for the site work.life.creativity earlier this week.

J.J. Abrams loves boxes. As a kid he would take things apart, telephones, TVs, what have you. For a TED talk he gave a few years ago, he brought in a Kleenex box he had dismantled just to look at how it was constructed, the scoring, the printer registration, etc. In his talk he spoke about this magic mystery box he got from Lou Tannen’s magic shop when he was a kid. [Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, California. Duration: 18:02. Transcript available here.] 30 years later, he still hasn’t opened it. That’s a lot of restraint for an eager, energetic guy who ripped apart a Kleenex box in a hotel room the night before his talk.

Personally, I’m not sure I would have had that much self-control with such a great magic box. I probably would’ve ripped the thing open as soon as I got home. Or sooner. But what’s important here is the idea of mystery, peeling away layers slowly until one arrives at the core of the thing they’re looking at. Or the core is never found. To use a worn-out cliche, I think many times with things in our lives the journey is far more important than the destination. Slowly unveiling mysteries and living off that suspense seems to be what has driven Abrams, informing his life and his work. Aren’t his shows Lost and Alias exactly that, all about mysterious, seemingly un-knowable things that are only revealed (or further obscured) bit by bit, layer by layer? Whether you like his work or not, it’s still compelling.

Do we have to have all the answers?

Sometimes you never get to the core, but I think that’s OK. Sometimes it’s better to not have the answer handed to you. What would be the fun in that? There’s no opportunity to explore for yourself, to use your imagination and be full of wonder about the possibilities that may exist. If we had all the answers, what would compel us to dream big? You can probably think of someone (perhaps yourself!) who failed to act because they didn’t bother to consider what possibilities existed.

My takeaway

For me the biggest takeaway from Abrams’ talk is this: how can I inject what I do with suspense and mystery? Abrams talks how films like Jaws and Alien build suspense and sometimes don’t even show what the big scary thing is. And sometimes the real gold is in the small, quiet moments between the big momentous ones.

That’s what that makes great movies, books, films, artworks compelling. Even when things seem plain as day, there’s always a little more to it than just that. What can you leave “unsaid” to be more compelling?

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It is essential to ask yourself this sort of question, whether you are doing knowledge work or physical labor. Knowledge workers don’t often immediately create a physical product as a result of manual labor. Rather, their work is more “virtual.” Physical work generally results in something tangible. They both deliver something. It sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Knowing what you are delivering lets you know when you are done.

Some simplified examples of professionals and their deliverables:

• Auto-body Mechanic/Technician - a fixed axle on a car, returned to the customer
• Web Developer - optimized, valid (x)html files, uploaded to the server
• Print Designer - high-res CMYK PDF, sent to printer
• Marketing Coordinator - bulleted list of marketing mix strategy for next year
• Novelist - 300 pages of manuscript

Now, art is a weird hybrid between manual labor and knowledge work. You can end up with a physical object like a sculpture. Or you can create something abstract like a song, experienced in the moment and described even more abstractly with coded marks on paper. Often enough, though, the final result reaches physical form somehow. The end product for poetry is likely to be some sort of bound volume with those poems in print. And music? Well, it can come in the form of a compact disc, a digital download, or a concert with concert-goers clapping their hands enthusiastically.

If you’re still with me, I realize you may be saying, “All right, Captian Obvious, it’s pretty plain that a painter will end up with a painting and a novelist will end up with a novel.” Right. But this kind of thinking will help you focus on your end product and not get sidetracked, as we artists are wont to do.

The bottom line is, this is outcome-based thinking. It helps you know when you’ve reached your goal because you were specific about it. You have created the promised deliverable, whether that promise was to yourself or someone else.

When you’re creating things, you can’t rely on inspiration alone, only painting, writing, sculpting, whatever, when the mood strikes. You have to show up on a regular basis, day in and day out. Creative efforts require a lot of commitment and professionalism. When you do this, you will be “favored by the Muse(s),” if you follow a more mystical viewpoint a la Stephen Pressfield or Julia Cameron. I like how Chuck Close puts it:

“I always say that inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.”

In an interview with NPR, Chuck Close talks about how his modular marks (I think of them as hot dogs) wind up becoming massive nine-foot self-portraits just through hard work and dedication.

Put this practice into action by setting specific times to work, then stick to it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be 8:00 am to 5:00 PM, but it does need to be consistent and regular. (I know one artist who goes to bed at 8 or 9 PM and gets up at 3 AM to paint, and he does some pretty amazing stuff.) Personally, I try to set aside Tuesday evenings and Saturday afternoons to paint, since that’s what works best with my schedule.

Morning Pages are another form of showing up. (In fact, I think Julia Cameron uses the phrase “showing up at the page” in her book The Artist’s Way.) You show up and you write, dumping out everything that’s in your mind and on your chest, stream-of-conscious style. Showing up like this also gives you the benefit of figuring out what you really need to be doing.

So if you really want to bust creative block and “turn professional,” you have to show up on a regular basis.

I’ve talked about gumption traps a lot recently: gumption traps in general and in specific for artists and graphic designers. Gumption traps, or creative blocks as they’re more commonly called when applied to creative disciplines, are common to all, but they appear to crop up most often for beginners. The seasoned artist experiences blocks, too. Perhaps as often if not more often than the beginner. The thing is, the pro isn’t set back for very long, while the beginner may get stuck on something for a long time.

How the Professional Confronts Creative Blocks

When faced with a trap or a block, the seasoned professional:

• Recognizes traps for what they are
  They’re setbacks that can get you stuck if you let them, but nothing that can’t be overcome.
• Has dealt with them before
  He or she knows from experience what to do in those tricky situations that stump beginners. Not to imply that every problem has a ready-made solution out there, but an artist will encounter a lot of similar problems in his lifetime.

Does an experienced artist whine, gripe, and complain about a particular piece? You betcha. But he moves on and keeps doing his work, not letting a little setback keep him down. It’s part of “turning pro” as it’s explained in The War of Art. It’s all about attitude.

I’m not dead yet!

The bottom line is this: the dedicated professional knows he’ll survive no matter what blocks come his way. He’s lived through them before. So why get worked up over one little setback now, if the setbacks in the past were overcome at some point?