Art, Creativity & Uncertainty

As someone who has a difficult time dealing with ambiguity and who longs for certainty in all things, this quote from one of my favorite books on creativity and art is a strong reminder that the quest for assurance has a price. Not to mention that it's both foolhardy and naive (and arrogant) to think that we can have full control over our lives.

"Control, apparently, is not the answer. People who need certainty in their lives are less likely to make art that is risky, subversive, complicated, iffy, suggestive or spontaneous. What's really needed is nothing more than a broad sense of what you are looking for, some strategy for how to find it, and an overriding willingness to embrace mistakes and surprises along the way. Simply put, making art is chancy -- it doesn't mix well with predictability. Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. And tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite for succeeding."
David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear

More often than not, those of us who seek certainty are also perfectionists (as a side note, studies show that women are more likely to define competence as perfection, which leads them to set standards that are unnecessarily high). And those same people tend to thrive in situations (school, jobs, professions) where predictability and perfection are expected and rewarded, so that our behavior and thinking are continually reinforced.

I wrote earlier this year that making book structures struck me as an essentially left-brained activity, and that it's what we do with the book beyond the structure itself that involves our right brain (other thoughts?). So over the past year I've been actively seeking out (right-brained) techniques that I know little or nothing about and that complement my bookmaking. Bit by bit, for example, I've been learning about working with paint. I've consciously looked for classes that let me throw paint around, so to speak, since the point is to free up some of that fear of spontaneity.

Not surprisingly, being encouraged to "throw paint around" has been immensely satisfying. And although I can't (yet) call these types of activities transformational, I'd like to think that they're helpful steps on the road to new forms of creative expression. I remind myself that it's ok if I can't see the road clearly or know what's at the end of it, as long as I'm learning and enjoying myself.

(Image: Leonardo Da Vinci's sketch for what we now call a parachute.)

The Penland Experience - Part 3

I finally managed to take photos of the books I made at Penland, and here are some of those images.

I'd worked only briefly with acrylic paint in the past, so I was looking forward (although with a bit of trepidation), to my two-week Book Arts workshop at Penland, where we were going to paint papers for our books. I wasn't disappointed. We spent days and days painting layers of paint on both sides of large sheets of Arches Cover. We used various techniques and tools to create texture with each new layer. We cut up the papers and used them as pages for the books we made. Altogether, we made about a half-dozen books, each a different structure, each a little more complex than the last.

We supplemented this with other processes: printmaking (making collagraphs on an etching press), carving rubber stamps for mark-making, and using handwriting as graphic imagery. I loved it all. I loved it and I was anxious about it. "Am I doing it right?," I kept wondering. After a while, I stopped wondering. I still wasn't sure, but I'd decided to treat what I was doing as an experiment. After all, if you can't experiment during a workshop, when can you?

So though perfectionism and I are on a first-name basis, I told myself that wanting to achieve perfection at something that others -- notably, our instructor, Laura Wait --had been doing for years was just a titch overambitious. The self-talk helped, and there's something about Penland itself that encourages you to take risks and try new things.

I didn't lose all my fear when I was in the studio (fear of failure, of embarrassment, of whatever else scares us when we feel vulnerable), but what was left was healthy. It was the kind of fear that pushes you to create even though you're not sure of the outcome. And since by nature and habit I really like to know the outcome in advance, managing to live with the ambiguity was a big deal.

I read somewhere today that, in art, the most important thing is to start, and the second most important thing is to finish, and that if you do those two things, everything else will take care of itself. In a fundamental way, that's what places like Penland give you: a start and a finish. And that makes the next time all that much easier.

More to come.

Drum leaf binding (developed by Tim Ely) - the book is approximately 15" high by 3 1/2" wide.

The first two-page spread from the book. We worked with signs and symbols.
I focused on the triangle and the letter 'M'

A close-up of another of the spreads from the book

We overpainted mylar that we'd used underneath our pages as we painted.

A two-page spread from another book

A head-on view of the pages of another book