Why your 'why?' matters

An old post Wix now makes me edit because I added an image!

I mentioned a Creative Pep Talk a couple of weeks ago; figure out why you do what you do and you’ll understand where you’re going. Ann Rea has some great perspectives on this too – some straight talking in this interview!

Anyway, I was just sort of “Why?? Cuz I like it”. But I thought “ok, let’s spend a bit of time on this”.

I’d heard the idea that you’re not selling art, you’re selling an emotion. Watching Portrait Artist of the Year, I’m now noticing just how many sitters choose the portrait that isn’t always the most technically accomplished, but the one that has some kind of emotional resonance for them.

Aahh. Starting to get it now.

Subconsciously, I’d been striving for that in the art I’d been doing over the last year. The newer pieces were looser and more expressive. Expressive? That’s not me. I do stoic very well though.

But hey-ho, art equals life apparently.

My earliest sculptures were all about perfect placement. Look pretty nice, but…Then I fancied doing more interesting stuff, and explored completely different shapes and tested out interesting angles. The tilt of the head, the turn of a shoulder, hand gestures – they can convey something more.

My recent painting stint was supposedly just about distilling poses down to the essential lines; actually they also ended up being very expressive despite their simplicity. The inner self was finding a way to speak.

Then I added colour. Strangled the life out of them.

I’d added structure to something that was meant to be more unstructured then struggled with the backgrounds. These, now carefully composed pieces of shape and colour, needed a dash of something more spontaneous and I couldn’t reconcile the two things. A tug of war between order and (a bit of) chaos.

There’s my life’s struggle. Moving cautiously, trying to control every step interspersed with taking mad leaps of faith to open up possibilities. A constant stop/start. But if you never throw yourself fully into anything, you’re not fully living.

So I decided to make art again while stopping any momentum by wanting to know how to do it all before I got to it. The 'unknown' being a pit of anxiety and doom of course. Maybe.

Which is daft, because here’s someone who packed in a job, sold the house and went travelling because dammit things needed shaking up. Then packed in another job to move to Devon to do art. No plan beyond the first step. Funny how the little things seemed scarier...but the lesson is that the good moves are the ones you do without strangling the life out of them by questioning your sanity or ability.

Now, I’m definitely not the only one stuck here. I dabbled in life coaching and saw this a lot from people - staying small, unable to trust in themselves, thinking they can’t become what they always wanted to be, constricted by (probably wrong) ‘lessons’ of early life.

Me too. So instead, I made strong, flexible acrobats and dancers do by proxy what I wasn’t doing i.e. stretching my limits.

And that’s why I’m trying to make this art. I can do more. Be more. Most of us can. But we hold ourselves back.

Imagine being someone who could do what you really want to do.

You could sit and quietly watch life pass by, but how much more thrilling to dive in and create your own performance? Not sure if it'll work out? No one is. Not even the brightest and the best.

Does any of that make sense to you?

We all have to evolve and so does our work - I now get what was missing from earlier pieces. I also see that changing it up doesn't make earlier work bad. It's just different. Going back to the drawing board should be exciting even if it risks making a mess of things!

I’m learning to be fine with that because you can’t plot out creativity – you have to be open to it and that means not knowing what might come next. Not doom for sure.