Creative Cogitation

I love cre­at­ing.  I have to cre­ate.  If I could find a way to con­tin­u­ously paint or what­ever and keep a roof over my head, food in my belly and keep myself in art sup­plies, I would.   I am still work­ing on that.  A lot of my pre­vi­ous writ­ings have been about the busi­ness side of what I am try­ing to do, but I really would like to write more about the cre­ative process.

I have stuff that wants to get out.  It has to be expressed.  I have a need to do this thing.  It is very frus­trat­ing not to be able to do it and I have been frus­trated a very long time.  I was a good stu­dent, but I was always doo­dling in class.  I don’t doo­dle much any­more as my cre­ative time is very lim­ited these days.  I think I would like to doo­dle again.

The Ran­dom Reverie part of the blog is for peo­ple who have the same need as me, the need to cre­ate.  It’s a very spe­cial brand of insan­ity.   I have to be insane to want to keep doing some­thing like this after hav­ing my pegs knocked out from under me again and again.

These days when I decide to art, I art; I don’t want to lose the spirit of the thing before it gets done.  I have to focus intensely as my time is lim­ited.  Just like many of you I also have to keep doing the stuff that keeps the roof over my head, the lights on, food in my belly, food in my crit­ters’ bel­lies etc. The way I accom­plish my goal is through my process.

I usu­ally do some prepa­ra­tions before I paint as I gen­er­ally need to know where my paint­ing is going before I lay brush to can­vas, but I do not spend so much time prepar­ing that I don’t get to the can­vas.  Recently I built a skele­ton of a dragon out of pipe clean­ers so I could fig­ure out how the dragon would work. I did sev­eral sketches then loaded the result into Pho­to­Shop to do my lay­out and fool with the col­ors.  I’ve cre­ated trans­par­ent over­lays so I can see how the lay­out is inter­act­ing with the Golden Mean and the the­o­ret­i­cal ideal loca­tions of focal point.  A lot of times it is spot on, but some­times I break the rules.  Once I start paint­ing it usu­ally goes pretty fast.  That is my process, but it may not be yours.  I know sev­eral other artist’s whose tech­nique for get­ting it done is the com­plete oppo­site of mine; maybe they flip on their favorite tunes, spend some time select­ing their pal­let then let the brush and the paint on the can­vas tell them where they are going, let the his­tory develop real-time.  (Some­times I do it that way too.) The point: You have to have a process for get­ting it done, a cre­ative work ethic if you will.  I can’t tell you what that process will be as you need to fig­ure it out for your­self.  If you do not have the will to fin­ish what you start, if you do not have a process that leads to com­pleted work, then you prob­a­bly will not get it done.  Your process may change over time. Your process may vary.  The goal is to get it done, get it out, com­plete the thought of the moment and set if free.

Focus serves another pur­pose as well.  When you are con­cen­trat­ing on your art, you are not indif­fer­ent, you are set­ting your cre­ative ani­mal free.  It doesn’t mat­ter what you pro­duce, it mat­ters that you care about what you syn­the­size.  Some artists do pure abstracts while oth­ers do photo-realistic still-life, some artists paint por­traits while oth­ers paint big-eyed char­ac­tures, some artists paint cityscapes while oth­ers do pas­toral scenes, some artists paint ani­mals while oth­ers paint flow­ers, some artist don’t paint at all, they do car­toons, sculp­ture, jew­elry, quilts.  No mat­ter what the result, there will be those who like it. But there will be  those who can’t stand it; they are not your con­cern.  Your con­cern con­vey­ing your pas­sion to your audi­ence.  If you don’t enjoy it, if it is just a job, I think it will show.  If you do not feel enthu­si­as­tic about what you are doing, I think that the con­nois­seurs of your sub­ject mat­ter will be able to tell.  Art must come from the heart.

PS.  As you cre­ate, you may be tempted to go fool with some­thing that you pre­vi­ously com­pleted.  I would say, “Don’t do that!”  The com­pleted thing is a com­pleted thought at that moment.  If you want to change some­thing, start a brand new thought.  Before you know it you may have a series.  You can learn a lot about your process while you explore vari­a­tions on a theme.  One thing that I have dis­cov­ered over time is that the paint­ing I like in a series, the one that I think most com­pletely expresses my thought of the moment, is very sel­dom the one that is the most pop­u­lar with my patrons.  Imag­ine if I had painted it over  in an attempt to per­fect my thought instead of let­ting it be; I would never find that my col­lec­tors had dif­fer­ent ideas.

Yours in art — Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!