00IV of potential hindrances to our creative development continued…

Back when I felt orphaned from any creative source, I noticed my tendency to choke out anything I didn’t recognize, understand or like in my work. These were parts I thought of as fugly or mistakes. It was part perfectionism, part self-doubt (your typical shame stuff) and there was a lot of that trying I addressed in the last article. The work that came out of this process was dry rational, rigid and trapped and I felt the same way. It was like seeing myself as a parent who felt oppressed by her parents and then went on to oppress her own children.

A reminder doodle from one of my notebooks. 2010.

I realized I had been taking myself way too seriously and was working way too hard. I finally got fed up with this feeling in a big moment of “well, f*ck it.” For now, I won’t go into the details of the events that lead me to turn my back on my uptight ways but I will tell you that the open sesame to my creative freedom was doing less and goofing around. 

It came as a pretty amazing shock to me when playing around with material just for kicks lead me to what felt like unlimited creative exploration and potential. I never had to look for ideas ever again because they always found me—and in the most exciting and surprising ways! To get to this point took some awareness of my habitual urges that wanted to judge and expect something familiar. I would get that voice in my head saying, “what’s this supposed to be?”, “this looks bad”, “you are doing this wrong and you are going to fail this project” and I would answer, “who cares?”, “so what?”, “it doesn’t matter.” With a playful attitude I was able to shrug off my inner critic freak without getting into a brawl with it. It’s like when you’re having a great time, laughing and enjoying yourself and some whiner comes on the scene—it’s super easy to ignore them. But if we’re taking things too seriously, it’s a cinch for someone to trigger us and suck us into their negative vortex.

Now some of my students (adult mainly) perceive play as a pointless or unproductive act. Like, “Oh, well, if we’re just going to mess around here why not just scribble?! You’re right, I really don’t care about these scribbles!” If you are feeling the same way allow me to clarify a little. Although it’s not serious, goofing around feels very sincere to me. Sincerity is something very different from seriousness. Seriousness is paying undue importance to something at the cost of everything else. We tend to miss any glinty insights on the periphery. It is the result of over-expectation of life. It closes our minds to the openness, freedom and continuous unfolding of life by holding us in familiar patterns. Seriousness is too concerned about the result; it resists spontaneity and therefore creativity.

Sincerity, on the other hand, is without worry; there’s only enthusiasm. When I am working in my studio, there are no mistakes. As I’ve described before, I allow the material to lead me by just playing with it and observing it with pure curiosity and no thoughts about what it is or isn’t. It has all of my attention and all of my senses are heightened. I don’t think of anyone else and, eventually, I forget myself. Through sincere goofing around, I feel closest to some source and the work never feels like labour. So what is it about play that makes it feel like such a powerful gateway to the growth and expansion of our creative expression? 

Diane Ackerman. American poet, essayist, and naturalist.

I could speak more about my personal experience of this but it just so happens that Diane
Ackerman wrote a whole book about it called Deep Play. Here she relates play to our evolution:”

“Why play at all? Every element of the human saga requires play. We evolved through play. Our culture thrives on play. Courtship includes high theater, rituals, and ceremonies of play. Ideas are playful reverberations of the mind. Language is a playing with words until they can impersonate physical objects and abstract ideas.”

[…]

“It’s so familiar to us, so deeply ingrained in the matrix of our childhood, that we take it for granted. But consider this: ants don’t play. They don’t need to. Programmed for certain behaviors, they automatically perform them from birth. Learning through repetition, honed skills, and ingenuity isn’t required in their heritage. The more an animal needs to learn in order to survive, the more it needs to play… What we call intelligence … may not be life’s pinnacle at all, but simply one mode of knowing, one we happen to master and cherish. Play is widespread among animals because it invites problem-solving, allowing a creature to test its limits and develop strategies. In a dangerous world, where dramas change daily, survival belongs to the agile not the idle. We may think of play as optional, a casual activity. But play is fundamental to evolution. Without play, humans and many other animals would perish.”

If you are wondering how sports or organized play fits into this or if they are different from creative play, that is where Ackerman makes a distinction: 

“Deep play is the ecstatic form of play. In its thrall, all the play elements are visible, but they’re taken to intense and transcendent heights. Thus, deep play should really be classified by mood, not activity. It testifies to how something happens, not what happens. Games don’t guarantee deep play, but some activities are prone to it: art, religion, risk-taking, and some sports — especially those that take place in relatively remote, silent, and floaty environments, such as scuba diving, parachuting, hang gliding, mountain climbing.

Deep play always involves the sacred and holy, sometimes hidden in the most unlikely or humble places — amid towering shelves of rock in Nepal; crouched over print in a dimly lit room; slipping on AstroTurf; wearing a coconut-shell mask. We spend our lives in pursuit of moments that will allow these altered states to happen.”

[…]

“One enters into an alternate reality with its own rules, values, and expectations. One sheds much of one’s culture, with its countless technical and moral demands, as one draws on a wholly new and sense-ravishing way of life… One chooses to divest oneself of preconceptions, hand-me-down ideas, and shopworn opinions, chooses to wipe the mental slate clean, chooses to be naive and wholly open to the world, as one once was as a child. If cynicism is inevitable as one ages, so is the yearning for innocence. To children heaven is being an adult, and to adults heaven is being children again.”

This absolute freedom to choose, is the critical component for me; to feel free on the inside regardless of my external experience. This is where I find the least resistance and, therefore, the most receptivity, clarity, energy etc. That is why how something is made is a bigger deal than what is made. Having said this, there are artists who would claim that they dislike the making part and live for the results. Being playful may not be your path. It may be that grinding it out with a certain degree of suffering and exhaustion is how you surrender barriers. I wrote more about this back in Chapter 2. We really must find out for ourselves.

If you still feel limited by the assumption that the best creations are made with great skill and labour and time AND entirely by the artist (without cheating), perhaps it would be useful to look at some artists and their work. To be continued…

Yeah, anything could be art. Anything could be beauty. […] And that’s turning life into— you know, finding not only beauty— amusement, joy, fun. Finding fun where sometimes it’s just a bore; finding fun when it’s a burden. You can always make something look different.

-AGNES VARDA

*Disclaimer: No copyright infringement intended. I do my best to track down original sources. All rights and credits reserved to respective owner(s). Email me for credits/removal.