Creative work never bores me. It fatigues me and I take breaks, but it never really burns me out. It refreshes me. Each studio session becomes an improv exercise in going with the flow, especially if I don’t like the direction the work is taking.
For instance, today’s work might be shaping the leaves of a tree. The challenge becomes depicting both the patches of light coming through as well the movement from the leaves rustling in the wind. I’d begin searching magazines for shapes and colors true to the photograph but I’d also keep an eye out for oddities that introduce an element of surprise, anything from a soccer player to a movie poster. I also think as a designer, which means I eliminate clutter and make lots of adjustments to manipulate eye flow. But most importantly, I need to make people feel something, which is a quality you recognize but can’t describe.
If I show the truth of what I felt, not just the literal event or place itself, then I’ve done something right. And sometimes all those things are accomplished by gluing a lunging soccer goalie next to Jackie Chan’s head next to palm tree leaves next to cursive text.
Sometimes uncanny things emerge. The symbols I stumble upon in art remind me of dreams. I recently dreamt that I got to spend a day visiting my dream company way up on the seventeenth floor of a skyscraper. That specific detail caught my attention, as well as the ladder of drawers, not rungs, I climbed down against the purple sky. It wouldn’t have made a lick of sense had I analyzed the dream with my rational, dualistic mind. Instead, I considered it paradoxically. Only then did the dream mean something: ambition is wonderful; it’s good to want to succeed and achieve, but the drawers symbolizing my innermost being were empty. Ambition alone creates emptiness within. I knew this because I risked my neck all the way down, my foot kicking out every fifth drawer to step down on. They had to be empty so that I could reach the ground safely. Further, seventeen symbolizes completion and perfection as well as approaching death. In other words, life is short and the way to life is the way of death in the world’s eyes. Now there’s no way I could have known that the roman numerals that form seventeen can also arrange into words that spell “I have lived.” The mystery of such a dream is like the mystery of the creative process- it unveils something I (not even my subconscious) could have known
But besides being good at it, and besides being an escape from a dualistic mind, I would add that it fuses things I love- fashion, photography, food, gardens, foreign lands, pop culture, and all the writers who write about these things- into a new medium. Paper painting is comprised of all kinds of things I find interesting.
Furthermore I love the intricacy of the work. I think back to my freshman year of high school, my favorite year because we studied Christendom. What jumps to my mind from that year was the romance I felt for the cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts we studied. We learned that cathedrals took generations, not decades, to build. We learned about the Book of Kells and the mad attention and exacting care the monks took crafting the Celtic knots, labyrinths and triskelions. Such works of art and devotion inspired me. At the end of that same year I realized I should pursue art as a career. I admire the absurdity of spending years, even generations, on a single project that may or may not last. But love is extravagant and wasteful.
A good portion of the world would consider this sort of love self-destructive and delusional. It’s no wonder artists with this mindset starve. Do they really think their vision and talent is so immense as to justify years of devotion knowing such magnus opums may be ignored or rejected? Anyone with common sense asks preliminary questions before diving into a three-year project- ie, is there anyone remotely interested in spending $30,000 on a street scene of kids in a poor district of Shanghai?
But then I think about Antoni Gaudi, an architect who slaved the last eleven years of his life devising a cathedral he’d never see completed. He lived to work and lived as a pauper. Though his designs revived much of Barcelona, he was left for dead for hours when a tram hit him. He was just a common beggar with shabby clothes and no identification. Or Julian of Norwich, a nun who frittered away twenty years in the prime of her life alone contemplating the meaning of a vision that occurred one May day. Or Marcel Proust, lavishing God only knows how many tens of thousands of hours writing impenetrable extracts on the beautiful desolation of the Parisian aristocracy.
Such heedless waste depresses most of us who find simple joy watching another good season of Billy Bob Thornton in Goliath. I am that person. But if everyone lived that way, my freshman year would have been another boring year studying wars, feudalism and plagues. I would never have seen the things that sparkle in the dark, places like the Chartres Cathedral or the Lindisfarne Gospels. I would probably have opted for more sensible college curriculum. I would have graduated and taken a job that wouldn’t have required any real devotion or work that demanded anything beyond my talent, time and focus.