How do we decide what to create? Out of the vastness of our imaginations, how do we land on what we articulate, bring into form, life, shape?
I’ve never had to ask this question about my writing–I somehow instinctively learned early on to recognize what ideas had enough in them. I somehow knew how to sneak up on, lie down next to, rub up against an image or concept or feeling until I was sure I wanted to mate with it for the months and years it would take to create something worth my time.
I’ve yet to find my way to that sneaking up, lying down next to, rubbing up against phase with the art making. I know how I want to feel when I’m creating–excuse me for being a bit graphic but I feel it in my uterus when an image works. It connects with my seat of creativity literally. It’s not a sexual feeling but it’s certainly a life giving, life-lighting up feeling.
I associate that feeling with real art. I believe that honesty is created and communicated through the intent and even the touch of the artist: the intent to bring something new and real into being, not just rearrange what has already been, not simply be clever. It happens in words too, of course it does, in all mediums.
Thoughts on your process of articulating your heart into art?
7 responses so far ↓
1 cindy Mar 4, 2007
wow jen! i wish i felt the same body connection to creating. i stand in awe that u feel that. but i am still in “connecting with your body preschool” and taking small steps to learn how to pay attention there.
as far as how i decide what to create…it so far has usually just come to me. like the other day i thought wouldnt it be cool to do a series of nine paintings based on the design i created in design class. i ran it by my instructor to see if he would let me work on that the rest of the semester and he said ok. so off i went to get the needed supplies.
honestly i dont think much about “what has already been” or “being clever”. i know there are way too many artists who can create far better than i can…after all im just in the beginning stages of doing art.
i tend to go towards what attracts me. and i am just learning to find other artists who create the type of art i like or that i want to create.
when i do art i do feel the “life lighting up” feeling.
not sure if i addressed your questions…these r just some of my musings. cindy
2 Louisa Mar 4, 2007
I am a newcomer not to you as an author, but to your website, newsletter, and musings. I love your shares, and I check in often. Something in your latest stopped me. Please, don’t apologize for saying you feel your art in your uterus! Why not be graphic? I do professional speaking as a business, and my buddies and I talk about how sometimes we’re “speaking from the pelvis.” The whole body. And by the way are you really feeling art in your “uterus”? I have no sense of my personal uterus–it sounds so remote and clinical and medical. Do you mean your pelvis, your groin, your vagina, your thighs, what? I love reading what you said–I just want to hear more– more directly, more openly, more nakedly, what your experience is, and WHERE it is!
3 Jennifer Louden Mar 4, 2007
Okay, where is it in my body? Not my vagina, higher… I’ll pay attention next time and see exactly where but if memory serves, it’s like a warmth surging through the middle of my pelvis. Womb! That may be more accurate.
I’m so glad you can relate Cindy and Louisa.
I also been thinking since I posted this that I need to go into the formless place and see what wants to come. My pattern so far with art making (not writing) is to just start… I’m wondering if I’ve almost made a fetish out of intuition in making art, combined with my rather feverish attitude these days towards DO MAKE CREATE.
4 cindy Mar 5, 2007
what do u mean by “making a fetish out of intuition in making art”?
i have a feverish attitude too! i just call it passion. it would drive me if i had the time. so far i can only squeeze in about 2 hours a week to make art at home. it drives me nuts because i want to do 20 hours a week. but work and life call. so i squeeze it in where i can and pacify myself. and tell myself to be patient on this part of my journey even tho im impatient. i spoke with a one gal in my class last week and asked her how many hours she gets to practice art a week and she said 5-6 hours a day!! i died! i was so jealous. but she is retired. say can i retire too??? just kidding. cant. still paying off the motorcycle! thats it. cindy
5 Molly Gordon Mar 5, 2007
Dear Jen:
Your phrase “made a fetish of my intuition” struck a chord with me. I don’t know how it is for you, and that phrase resonates with one way I get side-tracked. It’s as if I’d rather wander in the desert than go to that formless place. Gives me a whole different take on why Moses and the Chosen People wandered for 40 years before reaching the Promised Land!
Sometimes I find I have made being lost a schtick. (Good Lord, what’s a nice lapsed Catholic girl like me doing in this metaphor?) And as I write this, I see the pay off. My ego wants to be the hero (rather than surrendering to the Divine or to whatever you want to call it), and so I wander in the desert until I am so desparate that, at a last resort, I drop into that formless space and wait.
The other spur to wandering in that desert of self-absorption disguised as intuition is hurry — I can be in such a rush to GET somewhere that I dive in to a so-called creative process without connection to purpose or source. But as Robert Fritz points out, creating requires dynamic tension between what is and what we want to create. Without that tension we are mucking about in the sand box. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s not creating.
All this leads me to the root of “intution,” from the Latin “intueor: to gaze on or in.” Intuition, then, is a function of contemplation, of going within, not a matter of interpreting nudges or hunches on the fly.
I am left with the awareness that, for me, the desire to either be the agent of insight (“I have it!”) or to go into magical thinking (“I’ll know it when I see/feel it.”) shortcircuits intuition as does my need to act now instead of wait.
Don’t know what, if any of this, applies to your process, Jen. And I am – as always = grateful to have your ideas to consider.
6 Jennifer Louden Mar 5, 2007
Molly, you nailed it! What you wrote is absolutely briliant and puts into words what I’ve known for about a year now but haven’t wanted to acknowledge.
My shadow (?) or weak spot is always the hurry to get somewhere, to get done, to move forward. I actually love making art because I thought it would be a way to skip the scariness of going into formlessness…
HA!
7 Gayle Gregory Mar 8, 2007
For me it is all about alignment. I know that true creativity is coming through when I slow down and listen to Heart within. It feels open and spacious; I don’t feel it any particular place in my body as much as a vibration of my Whole body, and then…the words begin to flow effortlessly. As my partners and I were writing “The Grand Experiment”, the messages seemed to flood into the physical plane when we were aligned and open to this possibility. If we were mired in our fears–our head games–the message stopped, as if we had crammed a cork back into a bottle of champagne.