Heartsong Studio

Her mouth was dry and her hands were shaking as Jenna headed for the podium. Though she was a master on the subject of art marketing, facing her first large audience, the footlights seemed blinding.

Does this remind you of setting up a flawless white canvas or paper? You might have had a concept of what you wanted to paint, but you were held frozen like a deer in the headlights.

What can you do to overcome this intimidation ?

Jenna had brought note cards to use, so she’d have back up support for her nervousness. Seemed like a flawless plan. But, when she looked down at the top card, she saw she had picked up the wrong set of notes !

Being an open, honest person, Jenna feigned tossing the cards over her shoulder, and told her audience what had happened. Then she went on speaking to them personally from her experience and knowledge of the subject. She adjusted it to suit the audience responses.

Having made the effort to come to this talk, people were already on her side. They loved her for being a fallible human being and her off-the-cuff talk ended up warmer and more human.

How can you charm the glare off a pristine canvas?

Spill paint on it !

Yes. It works. As Jenna fessed up to her mess up, you too can mess up the thing that’s got you stuck.

Choose an acrylic colour like yellow ochre, which is not too dominant.

Mix up a largish amount of very fluid paint.

Toss it randomly on a canvas or paper that lies flat on a table.

You can pick it up and tilt it in all directions to help the wet paint run around. Or, you can use a drinking straw to blow the paint in different directions. If you’re going to spill, might as well really enjoy yourself.

Leave it to dry awhile.

Then take the canvas or paper in your hands and view it from different directions, gazing at this splotch as you might gaze at cloud formations. Keep dreaming into it until you spy something wanting to emerge.

With white gesso or paint, ‘erase’ everything which isn’t a part of your vision. As your image form emerges, it will respond to your warmth and take on a life of its own just as did Jenna’s audience. Your decisions will be guided from here on by your relationship to the image you see. Your image will let you tease it out if you respond with warmth.

Just as Jenna won the hearts of her audience by being candid, so too will you charm the image into existence and make a more interesting painting which you couldn’t possibly have preconceived alone.

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“Forget the touchy-feely woo-woo spiritual stuff, just tell me how to make art !” declares a beginning artist. The strange thing is, the same person who thinks this, knows deep in their heart that emotional responses are directly related to the expression of deep feelings in their art.

I know, because I’ve watched lots of people try the “paint-by-numbers” approach to applying nuts-and-bolts to get their art making skills going and still the juices don’t flow.

Don’t get me wrong; you need nuts and bolts.

Effective art of any kind is not just the absence of chaos, but the presence of organized inspiration. The artist needs an organizing principle to do justice to an inspired expression before it can really come to life.

With deep feeling as a motivating force, you’ve got a reason for the nuts and bolts. You cannot make good art with just the strong feelings either. You need some sort of discipline to back up the feelings.

A balance between heart and control.

When either the feeling or the technical side of things is overweight, it seems to push you away, and feels chaotic or contrived. When the delicate balance point is neared, the impact lands and fills us with personal response and meaning. That’s what making art is all about — delivering an impact with meaning.

The balance is quite easy to observe in this artist.

Lea Salonga sings: “I’ve never been in love before” on YouTube here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO65KQhCuAc

There’s a delicate blend of control and emotion. You can clearly hear the control, yet it doesn’t push you away with stiffness. Instead, her voice control draws you in. It’s all for the purpose of delivering the impact.

Which comes first ?

What sets a work of art apart from a diagram is the spirit inside it. Whether you think your feelings for the subject come first or the how-to techniques, both factors must be alive and working together before any impact can come about.

The technical parts of art making can frighten people too, just as the spiritual connection can. But techniques can be learned at any time they’re needed. When you’re motivated with feeling, a little technical learning has a real purpose and isn’t so scary.

Spiritual connection is a simple, universal way to connect with the inner feelings that can motivate your work. It doesn’t require you to make any woo-woo sacrifices or be untrue to your convictions in any way. It’s your own emotions you’re after to fuel your work.

The hard work comes in being vigilant about the ego mind. The ego mind is a crafty sucker, always trying to get control, impersonating God, and a variety of other slippery things.

It’s not a question of either-or.

Discipline is required, but not blind, unthinking discipline. It’s the discipline related to learning, to being a disciple. And this learning is about being able to discern the voice of the ego from the voice of your heart.

Effective art has both to be sure when they are in a fine tuned balance. If the technical know-how takes charge at the start, the feelings tend to get pinched out. That’s why many who have studied art formally, eventually run dry for lack of inner motivation.

No one can teach you just the perfect technique to render the feelings you need to express. You must become the expert on your feelings for a subject, and then the work becomes the joy of discovering the appropriate technique to express it.

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Putting your art out for peer review or the scrutiny of the public can be really nerve wracking. Up the fear another notch by submitting it to a juried show or for gallery approval. Aside from the stomach wrench of outing your art, the experience of being rejected really bites.

Then, oh boy, let the second guessing begin.

You start wondering if maybe you should have made it more ***, less ***, or if the judges are prejudiced, or you just don’t have the ‘talent’.

It’s actually not about the rejection.

The issue is never the rejection itself — it’s always a person’s relationship to the rejection. The judges’ rejection is a reflection of THEIR stuff.

Your reaction? A reflection of YOUR stuff.

We all tell ourselves stories that explain why the pain of rejection happens.

If you think it means you are incompetent then you’re going to be disappointed a lot. Waiting for someone else — or something else — to confirm your right to feel okay about yourself, is no good.

Your opinion of me is none of my business.

Don’t mistaken your art for yourself and confuse rejection of your work with personal rejection.

It’s your art that’s judged and rejected, not you yourself.

The thing we all need to practice is gradually letting go of the need for both rejection and acceptance — so you can get to the point where you can trust your own abilities and opinions.

All other feedback, whether positive or negative, is secondary. It doesn’t define you. It’s just more information for you to consider, should you ever choose to.

What are the chances of having your work rejected ?

Logically, only 3 results are possible:

> Some will like your work.

> Some will dislike it.

> Some will have no opinion.

So there’s only a slim 33% chance of your work receiving positive acceptance.

Decide ahead of time what purpose is served in putting your work out there. What are you really looking for ?

Galleries are interested in finding styles of art that fit their clientele’s tastes. When you submit your art to a gallery to be included in their stable of artists they are not going to critique your work. That’s what you pay a teacher to do. Even a Picasso would probably not be accepted in a gallery specializing in landscapes.

If your art is singing or dancing and you want to land a plum role, then of course you’re going to have to compete with many skilled artists. Competition here makes sense but you know that going in.

You are the only qualified judge of the quality of your own work.

Beats me why anyone would seek out juried artshows. What’s up with comparing different pieces, like apples and oranges anyway? And then, who are the judges and what makes their particular opinions relevant to anything?

Great reviews are the worst.

They mislead you more than the bad ones, because they only fuel your ego. Then you only want another one, like potato chips or something, and the best thing you get is fat and bloated.

The snap win can turn out to be a tragedy of epic proportions. Your success in always being accepted might have disastrous implications, keeping you in an ivory tower, or shielding you from growing and changing.

Over time, a loss often turns out to be a win.

There have been times I was incredibly grateful that my work wasn’t accepted.

Well, okay. Not at first. But eventually I came to see the benefit.

Understanding the reason behind that rejection could unlock the door to understanding a much bigger picture than you currently see. It could lead you to addressing a part of your work that needs expanding, softening, deepening, developing… You may end up eternally grateful for that rejection, as I have been.

It takes time.

In my experience, you can’t learn to trust your own opinions and abilities overnight, unless you happen to be already well rounded, balanced, skilled, and can gracefully shift with growth and change. If you are, please let me know.

Right now you can take your feelings of fear of rejection inside. Without pushing them away as bad and thus making them stronger, accept them as your state of the moment. Know that it is perfectly okay to feel however you do. Sit with it tenderly.

When the pain of rejection has dissolved, begin again where you left off bettering your work. In your own terms. The goal is not to gain acceptance, but to gain the freedom from depending on rejection or acceptance. Stick with your chosen path by being loyal to your heart first and always.

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