ART, AWARENESS, AND BALANCE

Hello and welcome!

Thank you for joining me for another another monthly newsletter. I hope my sharing offers you insights around your own creative process, along with some strategies to strengthen and nourish your Artist’s Mindset.

This will be my last newsletter for 2020 as I take some time in December to reflect, recalibrate, and replenish my creative wells. In recent weeks I have been reminded of the need for balance. And as this year delivered up a serving of extraordinary circumstances to manage and adjust to, we’re all feeling the weight of that. More than ever we need to extend compassion toward ourselves, especially when we feel overwhelmed or incapable of going deeper, working harder, or taking on something new and demanding. Each one of us needs to find our own balance, and right now I am finding mine as well.

I am deeply grateful to my community of artists that continue to inspire me with their courage. I draw so much of my energy from you and through witnessing your growth. If I have shared just one thing that has guided you to meet yourself with more kindness and helped you bravely push past resistance to make your creative work, then I feel uplifted and deeply connected to my purpose.

Thank you for being here with me through 2020 and for offering me your generous words for these newsletters. I love hearing from you! I wish you all a warm, safe, and blessed holiday season. May 2021 bring us all some balance and peace.

This month’s Blog post came about rather spontaneously after I caught myself in a moment of blindness and began to think about the challenge we have with truly seeing what is in front of us. Living in these times we are flooded with images and stimulation that can overload our senses. As artists, we need to spend time cultivating practices and methods to slow ourselves down so we can take in what we most need, and allow that to support and inform our creative work.

And just a reminder that my monthly Blog post is also offered as an audio recording, allowing you to listen rather than read. To listen to the recording just click on the READ MORE OR LISTEN button in the ‘FROM THE BLOG’ section of this newsletter and you’ll find the MP3 file on my website at the bottom of my written post.

If you have any feedback for me, I always love hearing from you. Thank you for reading and sharing this newsletter…it truly is appreciated.

PS: For those of you that are new subscribers I have included some links to previous issues of this newsletter – full of additional resources for you!

FROM THE BLOG

LOOKING WITHOUT SEEING

“I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect” – Emily Carr.

Have you ever noticed how we become unaware of what is actually in front of us because we’ve seen it too often? Attentional selectivity has been well documented as a method we use to function. Taking in every visual in our field would be overwhelming, so we filter, focusing our attention on what we deem to be the most relevant details. This ability frees up energy in our brains for other tasks. We are so good at this that we seldom even notice we’re doing it. 

I recently became aware of this attentional selectivity when I realized I had been overlooking a cluttered pantry that had been this way for so long that I no longer saw it. Until that moment, I had looked past the clutter, focusing only on what I needed to retrieve. We naturally tune out what our brain deems to be unimportant, so I simply retrieved what I needed. The fact that my pantry was a mess didn’t serve my purpose at that moment, so I was blind to it. I wondered how I could be looking at this clutter for so long and not be seeing it!

This experience prompted me to ask the question, what happens when we really need and want to see – like when we are making our art? There are times in our creative work when we need to see clearly and thoroughly to make the important decisions and choices. So how do we switch off the filters that deploy organically after looking at something continuously for some time?

We all know how it feels to have looked at our work for so long that we just can’t see it anymore. We lose our objectivity and feel lost. This is when we need to bypass our tendency to simply look and instead consciously see.

What helps is to slow down and get methodical. Take some time to make a complete visual inventory of what you are seeing in your work. Use mindfulness to observe what you are seeing, as you would to observe your thoughts. Make an extensive list of what you are noticing, and do this as a neutral viewer, withholding any and all judgement – there will be a time for this later. Once we have taken time to simply be an observer, we will have more information to be a discerning judge of our work, giving our observations clarity and purpose.

INSPIRATION FOR YOUR ARTIST’S MINDSET

JANET ECHELMAN : TAKING IMAGINATION SERIOUSLY

You may be familiar with Janet Echelman’s work as it occupies spaces in our public world as art installations and sculpture. With work installed across five continents, Echelman’s sculptures can be found in urban spaces and often speak to topics current to our time and cultures. This year she installed her work ‘Bending Arc’ in St. Petersburg Florida, which is her largest permanent sculpture to date. The work’s title refers to Martin Luther King’s words: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Echelman’s sculptures fill the airspace above cities and parks with their fluid movement. Activated by nature – wind, light, and water – her work feels both monumental and rooted in the environment. Other permanent works can also be found in Porto, Vancouver, San Francisco, West Hollywood, Phoenix, Eugene, Greensboro, Philadelphia, and Seattle.

In this 2011 Ted talk Janet Echelman tells us how she came to do this work. I found a connection between this video and my most recent blog post on ‘Looking Without Seeing.’ When faced with the loss of her paints and a deadline looming, she found herself looking at the fishing nets being gathered, bundled and mended by the locals on the beach. As she spent time looking, she began to see.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI : HOW BOREDOM CAN LEAD TO YOUR MOST BRILLIANT IDEAS

Along with taking time to truly see what is around us, we benefit tremendously from allowing more space in our lives by inviting in some boredom. This Ted talk by journalist and podcaster, Manoush Zomorodi lays out the case for how our relationship to technology has hijacked our drift time, and we’ve let it.

Backed by a real-time experiment and research data, Zomordi shares with us the results of her ‘Bored and Brilliant Challenge.’ It’s quite shocking to recognize ourselves in what she shares and how that is impacting our creativity – which surveyed CEOs now rank as the number one skillset in leadership competency.

As artists we need to be very aware of this relationship between boredom and our creativity. If we’re bringing our phones or mobile devices into the studio with us, how is that helping us generate ideas for our work? When we feel stuck or uninspired, and that rising creativity anxiety begins to feel uncomfortable, what do we do? Relieve the anxiety with a scroll through Instagram? I know I have been guilty of all these things and have felt the difference in my art-practice as a result. I now have to intentionally weave drift time into my art practice and give myself some space to just be.

As we take time to savour the environment around us through deep looking, we’re also inviting ourselves to drift and daydream. By seemingly doing nothing, we’re actually boosting our productivity and creative work. We’re giving ourselves the nourishment our brains actually need, which is our creative fuel.

So next time you're headed to the studio, consider leaving your phone behind or putting it on “Do Not Disturb” and tucking it in a drawer. You’ll be so glad you did.

TOMÁS SARACENO : THE ART OF NOTICING

This Louisianan Channel interview with Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno is worth the discomfort one might experience. His heartfelt sharing of why his work has such meaning and value certainly overrides its focus and collaborator – spiders.

These beautifully lit, intricate web installations invite us to see more deeply, and with a certain kind of reverence. Saraceno asserts, “Every day, I try to enter territories, or thoughts, or ways of working, which might challenge ourselves and might challenge how we see the world.” He states that your world can be completely changed by observing a spider in its web for more than 20 twenty minutes. If you dare, of course.

This video reminds us to observe and give time to our environment, and to see what is around us in new ways. When we practice the art of noticing, we see things anew, form new understandings, and alter our perceptions and ways of being in the world. That is what art and artists do, and I love discovering work like this that really demonstrates that – spiders and all.

THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY : STEVEN PRESSFIELD

I was introduced to the work of Steven Pressfield though his book ‘The War of Art.’ That little book became a catalyst for me as I learned to be in relationship with my fear and resistance. I will pretty much read anything that Steven Pressfield writes as a result. I always find value in what he shares and the simple way he is able to speak to such complex subjects.

His 2018 book ‘The Artist’s Journey’ connects the concept of the Hero’s Journey – the experience of passage that our real lives provide for us before we find our true calling – to our journey as artists. Our struggle to overcome fear, resistance, self-sabotage and barriers of all kinds to make the work we’re meant to make.

This quote from the book says so much about the position artists need to carve out for themselves in order to endure and remain true to themselves:

“The artist learns how to be alone. She trains herself to find emotional and spiritual sustenance in the work.

Her need for third-party validation attenuates. She may still ask you of her work, “What do you think?” But she evaluates your response within the framework of her own self-grounded assessment of her gifts and aspirations – and of how well or poorly she herself believes she has used the one in the service of the other.”

PAST ISSUES OF THIS NEWSLETTER

For new subscribers – please enjoy these previous issues of my monthly newsletter. Thank you for subscribing!

October 2020
September 2020
August 2020
July 2020
June 2020

Links to additional back issues can be found on my website HERE

If you know of any Artists that could benefit from these monthly newsletters, please share and invite them to subscribe. They’ll receive my free PDF download on ‘How to Make a Creativity Journal’ when they do.

STRONGER TOGETHER

Art-making is such a personal experience, always calling us forth and asking us to be more of ourselves, to trust more deeply and to show up for the work.

When we develop a healthy and resilient attitude towards the struggles we may be facing, we feel more balanced and set ourselves up for success.

I hope this newsletter gives you some tools to help guide yourself towards more trust and awareness around your creative process.

Thanks for being here…wishing you abundant creativity today and every day!
Warmly,
Cheryl Taves
info@insightcreative.ca
h: 250.360.1453
c: 250.818.3239