Heartsong Studio

It’s still too tender.   Right after you’ve finished spilling your guts in a heartfelt work of art, words to describe it don’t often come easily, if at all.  You aren’t finished yet externalizing and integrating your mind and spirit around the new work.

This process can be helped by avoiding words and theory.  It thrives on silence and contemplation.  Some artists report that creativity requires a sort of blind energy and focused ignorance.

The seeds of doubt may be sown by words. Within words themselves there resides the potential disarmament of creative action.  The mind can easily override the heart and try to tell you how it should be.

Others’ words.

If you ask a lot of people for feedback, you may come away like leaving a psychiatrist’s session — wondering whether to turn right or left, where you parked your car, or if you even have a car.

It’s best to show a new piece to very few until your mind has digested it awhile.   For example, when I had just finished the painting “After all this time…”, I showed it to very few trusted friends.

After all this time . . .

One suggested my painting needed an object in the foreground to give a size perspective, like a crab or a rock on the shore. I was still vulnerable, having barely finished it.  The whole meaning hadn’t quite sifted up to my consciousness.   Having multiple perspectives was part of the whole point.

Another friend pointed out that you can never lose the horizon as my sun was taking a bite out of mine.  I hunted down a photo from nature that proved him wrong.  A-ha !  Damn it.  I was getting defensive.

But then he cared enough to suggest how waves appear in the distance.   I knew he was right about this.  When I found a way to change it that felt right, another layer of meaning came clear to me.

Often the complement is a pitfall.

“I like it,” tells you nothing useful, and it tends to encourage you to rest on your quest.   Although a detailed description of someone’s liking can give you another view you hadn’t thought of, as a third friend helped me by saying:

“I LOVE it !   It is beautiful.  The waves have so much strength and joy they just feel they can carry someone to the end of the world.  I understand why people want you to put in a rock or a crab; they are overwhelmed by the openness.  I found this openness so beautiful and full of promise and opportunity like a beginning.  I can see you dancing on the tip of the wave in the sunrise.”

All these friends gave me priceless gifts.

Criticism and praise can be equally helpful when they’re honest.  It’s not about being “right” or “wrong”.   It’s about trying others’ ideas on for fit.

Friends can often see our work more objectively than we can.  If our original concept can stay open to the light of others’ words, it can be strengthened and enhanced by the exercise.

Your own perception is the most valuable.

At first you may not be able to even give it a name.   When you do title your work, it helps give viewers a clue about its meaning.  Rushing this before you know yourself can curtail your process.

Usually the beginning seed of a concept morphs and develops as the work grows.   It is often through the exercise of honing in on the perfect title that you might integrate your mind and spirit around the deeper meaning, or else realize the limits of this piece.

It can take years to see into your own work.

All your art is autobiographical to some extent, coming from your heart as it does.  If you had unraveled and healed all your issues, then they wouldn’t be showing through.

Twenty-some years after painting certain watercolours, I finally see how poignant and full of yearning they are. I couldn’t see then how they revealed my soul.  Now those issues are resolving, I have found words for them and they have become valuable diaries which I keep as records of my growth.

December 2009 —

Finally I have titled the painting which I’d provisionally called “After all this time….”  to  “Source Eternal”.  The process took place as I described in this article.