Filling Your Creative Bank

The Faces at Braga by David Whyte

In monastery darkness

by the light of one flashlight
the old shrine room waits in silence.

While above the door
we see the terrible figure,
fierce eyes demanding. "Will you step through?"

And the old monk leads us,
bent back nudging blackness
prayer beads in the hand that beckons.

We light the butter lamps
and bow, eyes blinking in the
pungent smoke, look up without a word,

see faces in meditation,
a hundred faces carved above,
eye lines wrinkled in the hand held light.

Such love in solid wood!
Taken from the hillsides and carved in silence they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them.

Engulfed by the past
they have been neglected, but through
smoke and darkness they are like the flowers we have seen growing through the dust of eroded slopes, their slowly opening faces turned toward the mountain.

Carved in devotion
their eyes have softened through age
and their mouths curve through delight of the carver's hand.

If only our own faces
would allow the invisible carver's hand
to bring the deep grain of love to the surface.

If only we knew
as the carver knew, how the flaws
in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core,

we would smile too
and not need faces immobilized
by fear and the weight of things undone.

When we fight with our failing
we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good.

And as we fight
our eyes are hooded with grief
and our mouths are dry with pain.

If only we could give ourselves
to the blows of the carver's hands,
the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers

feeding the sea
where voices meet, praising the features of the mountain and the cloud and the sky.

Our faces would fall away
until we, growing younger toward death
every day, would gather all our flaws in celebration

to merge with them perfectly,
impossibly, wedded to our essence,
full of silence from the carver's hands

Boundaries

As an artist, I experience so many boundaries that keep me from producing what I want to be making. First and foremost is the fear of rejection. I've said before, I've been starting to sell my work online, and at conventions and festivals, and some shows I do really, really well and it is seriously such a confidence booster. But I recently had an experience where I didn't sell and single piece of artwork. I moved a lot of business cards, but I maybe walked out there with $10 more than I had walked in with.

It was easily one of the most disheartening things I have ever experienced as an artist.

This goes back to taste, of course. Also, my audience wasn't my usually targeted audience. I didn't connect with people, and people didn't connect with me. But I walked out of there with this feeling of wanting to burn all of my prints and just stop.

Time is another looming boundary of mine. I wish that there were simply more hours in a day to make things, but there isn't. And when I get overwhelmed I put art down--it's a horrible habit, because it's also my outlet. But I become so tired that I don't want to have an outlet.

A Vicious Cycle: Ira Glass and Mike Birbiglia

Ira Glass’s taste video is one of my favorite videos in the world when I’m feeling down about my work. This is why I’ve started to embrace the idea of failure. I’ve dedicated my sketchbook to failure, actually, because sometimes you just have to DO things, and as I’ve started to reach out and try and sell my work, my ideas of what’s good doesn’t necessarily come across to other people; as I embark on creating my original works in comics and graphic novels, my idea of what’s good won’t necessarily match up with what other people think is good, and that’s okay. Because someone out there will connect with my taste and if I can reach one person, that’s all that matters.

I found this chart after I actually watched the Ira Glass video, and I think this really relates to not only taste, but skill. 

Mike Birbiglia’s article is something I needed to hear, especially the three steps 1. Don’t wait, 2. Fail, and 3. Learn from the Failure. I’m so scared to start anything for fear of failing—like I mentioned about the Ira Glass video, I’m trying to embark on so many different paths in my artmaking, and I’m terrified of the failure of rejection. I’m so scared of being rejected, it seems better to wait, and rework things and rework things and keep reworking them in order to post pone actually doing anything. Artists are inherently vain creatures, I believe; we need validation for our art making, if we can’t get that validation we feel like we aren’t real artists and thus, must quit. It’s a horrible, vicious cycle, but it’s the worst cycle an artist can be in. 

9/8/2016

The Journey by Mary Oliver response:

I think this poem can be used to relate to the journey that a lot of artists take, and as educators--really, about any time one chooses to take a path that otherwise deviates from what other people expect of you. "Determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life you could save," speaks poignantly to me about you need to do the things that make you the happiest.

Devil Wears Prada response:

"This stuff." I love the way Meryl Streep's character says this, because it's how I react when people ask me about "this stuff" (contemporary art). Art in modern society can be attributed to centuries of art tradition, especially in our visual culture. A lot of the things we see are taken from historical references of art, and art criticism.

Aesthetic: Red and Figures and Marks

Images:
Top left: Kris Anka "Uncanny X-Force: issue #5 variant"
Top right: John Larriva "Sway"
Bottom left: Rick Berry sketch
Bottom Right: Alphonse Mucha illustrations