had experienced no passage of time.
At that moment I understood, for the first time in my life, something about the magic of art. Each hour spent in my books in graduate school was difficult. Some were fascinating, filling me with new thoughts and ideas. But none had ever annihilated my sense of time.
This experience bordered on the mystical. I did not want to stop; I did not want to sleep. Only my weariness caused me to put down the chisels and make my way back to my garret room. I could hardly wait to return and begin again.
Since that time, as both a sculptor and a writer, this ecstatic annihilation has called to me, beckoning me with the promise of being taken out of myself and transported to a place where I am nothing more than a vehicle for a vision.
All artists know this experience. This, more than almost anything else, is why we do what we do. It is an occasion of grace, and, once experienced, it holds with a power that will not let go.
This is also the reason why artists often speak of their work in religious terms. To be lifted out of yourself – to be taken up and used for what feels like a higher purpose – is to feel, if only for a moment, that you are participating in the creative power of the universe. You are held in the hand of something greater than yourself.
All of us want this experience. It is what lifts our work from craft to art, moves it into the realm of the spiritual and silences the critic who whispers constantly from our shoulder. It is the embrace of the incandescent present.
Artists have many ways of courting this embrace. Some have a ritual of preparation – from the simple way they lay out the work before them to a period of deep prayer or meditation. Some have physical spaces they have set aside where only their creative work can take place. Some work in silence; some surround themselves with music.
Japanese sword makers, seeking not ecstasy but clarity in their tradition of spiritual discernment, have a time-honoured and elaborate ritual of preparation and entry that becomes a portal to creative forces beyond themselves.
All of these have the same purpose: to put you inside the act of creation, so you are not making art, but art is being revealed through you.
If you would make a life in the arts, you must find a way to enter into this state. Chances are you have already experienced it, ever so slightly, while immersed in the practice of your art. Very likely it is what has driven you to dream of the artistic life.
But understand – just as there are days when you live in the presence of the creative spirit, there will be days when all your efforts turn to dust. Your work will seem false, your inspiration clouded. Instead of walking into a garden of imaginative possibilities, you will find yourself plodding through dry places where nothing seems able to grow.
Do not let the dry stretches and arid days deter you. They will come and go at their whim, and there is little you can do to change their course except to push with discipline during those times when you cannot proceed with grace, and to prepare, through ritual and spiritual focus, for the moment when once again you can be taken up into the joyful immediacy of creation.
What you cannot do is let yourself fall under the sway of the romantic notion that you should work only when filled with inspiration. Inspiration is a cruel mistress and a wily deceiver, and waiting for it will turn you into a lazy artist. Sometimes you must rely only on your own will to drive you forward.
Whether those times of working from sheer force of will produce good art or only prepare the ground for more inspired creation in the future is not for you to say. Yours is only to work, by such lights as you have, seeking the moment when once again you are not making art but art is speaking through you.
Remember this: if, in the act of creation, you find yourself, just for a moment, losing all sense of time and being lifted up into a great, all-embracing ‘Yes!’ where there is neither past nor future but only the magical and incandescent present, you have found the place where creation takes wing.
Honour this, seek this, court this. Do whatever you need to do to find that place where you inhabit your art and your art inhabits you. Then claim it and name it and find a way to call it forth – whether by establishing a space dedicated only to your work, or establishing a ritual of preparation and entry, or any other act that takes you away from the concerns of daily life and opens the door to the place where the muse sits on your shoulder.
When you find it, cherish it. In its own distant fashion, it is perhaps the closest we can come to a touch with the divine.
2
Finding a Vision, Finding a Voice
The search for authentic personal expression
‘There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost’ Martha Graham
I ONCE HAD a dear friend, a painter, who had magic in his hands. I looked with envy upon the ease and grace with which he could craft an image on canvas. I dreamed of someday having the same ease and grace in my own work.
One night, after a long bout of drinking, he broke down and began to unburden himself to me. Painting, he said, came easily to him. His capacity to shape human forms was like a God-given gift. Seemingly without effort he produced images that could have stood next to the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the pre-Raphaelites. But he was miserably unhappy.
‘How can you be unhappy?’ I asked. ‘You have such a talent.’
‘Oh, Kent,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand. If only I had something to say, I could say it so well.’
Those words have haunted me ever since.
It was as if he had some artistic mark of Cain upon his forehead, some perverse curse dreamed up by a vengeful god. He dreamed of being a great painter, but he felt he was nothing more than a masterful technician, and for him that was not enough.
Most of us don’t carry the burden of having too much talent for our artistic dreams. Usually we are driven to create by some great inner urge, hungry for external expression. Our struggle is not finding something to say, but finding the skill with which to say it.
For years, I felt sadness for my friend’s apparent lack of an artistic inner life. But as I’ve got older, I’ve come to realise that he did not lack an inner life, he merely had become tyrannised by what he thought his art ought to be. He did not see the genius in his hands as art enough and did not accept his artistic creations as reflective of a worthy artistic vision.
This happens to many of us. We study the work of those who have inspired us and try to imitate it. We project a fantasy of what great art is, or how an artist should act, and try to replicate it. In the end, we become copyists, no matter how skilled, because our work does not have an authentic heart; it references the artistry of others. No matter how much those works we reference speak to our own creative vision, we do not own them. They did not come forth from our own creative experience. We have become creative plagiarists.
There is no shame in drawing on the works of others as we develop our own voice and vision. It is, in fact, a great compliment to those who have inspired us. The danger we face is that those works touched us in a fundamental way, but we do not have either the aesthetic range or depth of human understanding to transcend them, or that they are simply an ill-fitting suit of artistic clothes for the artistic talent or temperament that we possess. We do not become the students who surpass the master, just the students who imitate the master. At some point, we need to step forth from their shadow and find our own voice.
I have another friend, also a visual artist, who creates beautiful pencil drawings that evoke images of cities and landscapes as seen from far above the earth. They are both lyrical and meditative, at once abstract and realistic. They engage the mind and enchant the eye.
One day