Heartsong Studio

Do you flirt with freedom or cling to control ?

Do you long to make meaningful art with feeling ?  When you are pulled in two directions at once, needing structure and technique, but longing for a fluid looseness, it can be disorienting, intimidating, and even crippling.

You might be comfortable making free forms only because you believe you can’t make anything look real.  Or, you could be well versed in the techniques and principles of art, but hampered by the rules and
afraid to tap into your feelings.

I once captured a wounded baby raven which couldn’t fly.  She had broken one wing on her fledgling flight, and was hopping in circles, flapping one wing.  Unable to fly, she was starving.  She was taken to a wildlife sanctuary, and after the broken wing healed, she learned to fly in a big cage.  A month later, “Fledge” was released to her waiting family.  Now she’s raising young of her own.

Making meaningful art is like learning to fly.  An artist and a bird have to exercise both wings equally: the wing of control and
the wing of freedom.  In order to fly successfully, both wings are necessary in a fluid balance.  We need both in making art
that holds any feeling.

In creative writing, two extremes might be: a flat matter of fact style with no adjectives, only short clips, and then hyperbole with flowery descriptions, and exaggerations.  Both extremes hide real feelings.

Too much flapping of the control wing in art making and the result feels rigid, exact, lifeless, bogged down.  Too much flapping of
the freedom wing results in chaos, confusion, pointless noise, numbness.  

Funny thing is, they’re both illusions !

Control in art making is necessary.  You need some goal and structure to start, some direction.  In order to communicate with viewers, you have to have something to communicate.  Viewers need connection and so does the artist. 

Actually, real control isn’t possible.  Can you control the air yo breathe ?  What about gravity ?  We all know what it is, but we don’t know how it works.  Explanations about bodies’ masses attracting only describe gravity.  It doesn’t explain it.

So too much control in art, while intending to depict something out there, communicates rigidity instead.  We may admire the draftsmanship or exactness of the work.  There’s a selfish focus in
it, because it believes in itself.  The feeling it holds is lifeless and sterile.

Is there such a thing as too much freedom in art ?  Artists who think they are letting it all hang out, and avoiding control, actually emit chaos and confusion.  “Anything goes” gives no reason to connect, because this approach begins and ends with me, the
artist.

We need a certain freedom in art in order to identify.  We’re attracted to a certain lovely looseness or lyrical grace which is
often called freedom. 

Too much freedom in art, while intending a jaunty, devil-may-care attitude, can actually feel uncaring or self-indulgent.   Nothing is totally free.  Lyrical looseness which goes too far, becomes a dog’s breakfast that no viewer wants to clean up.

Flapping too much with any one wing, will drive you in circles around yourself.  So why would you need freedom ?  Why would you need control ?  What good are the extremes ?

We’re on the path between control and freedom all the time in making art.  Like a  bird, we have to keep a fluid balance in order to fly successfully.  Too much chaos is the trigger to trim our control a little.  Too much rigidity is the signal to loosen up a
bit and see beyond ourselves.  One wing acts as a check on the other.

Here’s a classic Japanese exercise in finding a fluid balance between control and freedom.  This is deceptively simple, and very, very challenging.
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You’ll need one plain sheet of paper, and 8 identical dots.  The task is to arrange the 8 dots on the paper so that they are
aesthetically attractive and interesting : not too symmetrical and not too chaotic.  You can leave it sitting on a table and work on
it from time to time, like a chess board.

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Though we may have some notion of the ideal balance “once and for all”, that too would be contrived.  Flight requires continual movement and re-adjustment between these two wings. Sometimes the
movement is vigorous and sometimes it is almost still.

When you start a long metal shaft to vibrating, it starts with wide momentum, becoming ever, smaller and smaller, until it appears to stop.  But it never does.  There is no end.  This is called “movement in stillness” in Oriental philosophy; one of those paradoxes of life.

Becoming a more seasoned artist has no end.  You can practice it all your life.  It’s natural to be changing all the time within the spectrum of freedom and control.  We experience progressive freedom of, as well as, from the mind. 

This is both our task and our gift.  We have to be controlled enough to be healthy and free enough to be happy.

To be human is to be blessed with consciousness, as well as intuition ; mind as well as heart.  Rejoice ! 
Would you have it any other way ?