It doesn’t take much experience in the world to realize that sitting at a table or desk trying to think of new ideas can be lame. This follows what I’ve mentioned about the intention of capturing or grasping something leading to our missing it completely. Once I had ferreted out the resistance of my idea-in-my-mind clinging, I quickly clued-in that ideas could be found in materials and processes.

I’m convinced this was a return to my early childhood intuition that embraced my imagination as a fluid collaborator in the present. Perhaps images did float into my mind but I was playing them out immediately in the moment without attachment as if I understood their ephemeral and indistinct nature. As an adult, I am able to intentionally approach material without an idea and begin a process that will allow an idea to be found. The material and process provide the structure for me to be spontaneous without restraint (as I was saying in Chapter 3).

Allow me to give a fairly straightforward example that I share with all of my child and adult classes (ages 5-91yrs so far). It’s a bit silly so there’s a good chance it’ll connect us to our child-like curiosity:

On a blank sheet of paper, I paint (using cheap-ass watercolour or watered down India ink) random blobs with a bit of space in between. The spontaneous randomness of each blob is important because if they are all fairly uniform (like, all the same kinda ’round’) it could make the next step a bit frustrating. See the image below.
 I let these blobs dry and then I start looking for ‘something’ just as I might see a lamp in a cloud formation or a face in some wood figure pattern. This is an ancient idea that has been used to activate the intuitive mind and the more extensive capacity of the imagination (some may call this apophenia and you may also be familiar with the Rorschach inkblot test). Once I’ve seen something in a blob, I draw over the dry paint to fill in the details of the form I see (like in the next image below: made by a student). Students are totally shocked at what they find and draw and will ask me how it is possible to imagine something out in front of us instead of in our mind first. I bet someone out there has an answer for this but, personally, I prefer to leave this a mystery. 

I have used this process to activate my intuitive capacity (just to get into the flow) and to develop characters for comics and stories. In teaching comics to children, I have developed and shared my own lessons to guide students in creating their own original characters using this ink blob approach (one thing to remember if you plan on trying this with someone else: do not give in to the temptation to tell anyone else what you see in their blobs unless you recognize that it is your idea. What I see in anyone else’s blob is my own imagination at play. Allow them to connect with their own way of seeing—some people take longer than others to find ‘something’).

I have a fair number of finding-an-idea processes (but I can’t give up all my trade secrets here). Many of these are also unique to me and likely useless to anyone else because they are born out of what I particularly love. I will confess that I have almost forbid myself to work from a picture in my mind. It’s a bit of a tippy-toe dance when I get the first fluttering or flirt of a creative idea. I sort of suspend this misty stage and immediately get to some material before an idea has a chance to crystallize in my mind. If my thinking brain gets a hold of it and starts to ‘complete’ a picture of it, I will just drop it completely (I actually collected ideas like this on scraps of paper in a shoebox for a while). Otherwise, it’s like I’m caught in a rigid struggle to bring the crystallized thing out into physical reality while getting thrown off by its angles and the way the light hits it. I end up working like some fascist forcing the material to conform. With experience I’ve come to sense how to drift between the materializing and dematerializing flashes in my imagination and in my process so that I am led to something unexpected.

A fav of mine. Big Questions. Anders Nilsen. 2011.

Graphic novelist Anders Nilsen once remarked on this lean toward the unexpected: “When I was younger I spent a lot of time thinking about the idea that as an artist one should never know exactly what one is doing. If you already know what you’re doing before you do it you are on the wrong track. You should be doing your best to surprise yourself.”

If allowing something to ‘show up’ in our work is still a barricade, this may have something to do with being afraid to make a mistake. Theoretical physicist David Bohm pointed out:

“One thing that prevents us from thus giving primary emphasis to the perception of what is new and different is that we are afraid to make mistakes… If one will not try anything until he is assured that he will not make a mistake in whatever he does, he will never be able to learn anything new at all. And this is more or less the state in which most people are. Such a fear of making a mistake is added to one’s habits of mechanical perception in terms of preconceived ideas and learning only for specific utilitarian purposes. All of these combine to make a person who cannot perceive what is new and who is therefore mediocre rather than original.”

I’ve already brought up the dingy pit of shame that is the home of perfectionism and anxiety around making mistakes. My own way out of this was to consider that anything I made wasn’t really me or about me— I just took the role of the witness (which also helped me to open up to the unknown). This made it possible to consider ‘mistakes’ as essential to the whole (or even as the most important thing).

Something else that stands out in Bohm’s words is the habit of “learning only for specific utilitarian purposes.” What if we are known to roll our eyes at words like fantasy, enigma and magic?

Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it. 

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

[Cover image: source unknown]

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