'Strangely, we find that all along, we had what we needed from the beginning'

THE HIDDEN GIFT IN GOOD WORK

A true vocation always calls us out beyond ourselves; breaks our heart in the process and then humbles, simplifies and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place. Strangely, we find that all along, we had what we needed from the beginning and that in the end we have returned to its essence, but an essence we could not understand until we had undertaken the journey.

No matter the self-conceited importance of our labours we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine. Ambition might take us toward that horizon, but not over it - that line will always recede before our controlling hands. But a calling is a conversation between our physical bodies, our work, our intellects and our imaginations, and a new world that is itself the territory we seek.

A true vocation always includes the specific, heart-rending way we will fail at our attempt to live our lives fully. The humility earned through failure means we look for both visible and invisible help, that we cannot be complete without meeting and being helped by someone or something other than our selves and as its final gift, metamorphoses both ambition and failure into a generous compassion and understanding for others….

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from ‘AMBITION’ From CONSOLATIONS: 

The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press 2015

play

'The purpose of the universe is play. The artists know that, and they know that play and art and creation are different names for the same thing - a thing that is sweats and agonies and ecstasies...

Levity is the result of spiritual and aesthetic poise. All progress is towards levity through gravity. Weight, then wings. But it is wings that are the goal.'

Don Marquis

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five projects against disconnection

I just came across this draft which I wrote in 2014 but never posted.....

In relation to my post on 9th October, 2014, here's a summary of the things that matter to me.

• Human disconnection from nature, from the planet as a connected organism; from life, from the life force

• The increasing dominance of referred/mental experience: living in increasingly virtual worlds

• Disconnection from personal life force in the body: from voice, music, movement, dance, singing, creativity:
• less and less connection to the body - sitting at a computer all day long; lack of natural movement as part of this kind of work; exercise as something which treats the body as a machine that has to be mechanically put through its paces at the end of the day
• less and less connection to our own creativity - the dominance of cultural ideas which tell us that only a gifted few are 'talented' enough to 'be creative'

Looking at what has come out of the instinctive process that I've been following, I seem to have sown the seeds of five potential projects/areas:

1. Creation. Performance/painting based on a creation hymn from an ancient Hindu text, the Rig Veda.

A three thousand year lament about meaning and purpose, focussing on the mystery of the creation of a mysterious world.

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2. Into the pink. A series of paintings exploring the colour, forms and feel of the human body.

A visceral exploration of the cellular reality of human life forms.

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3. The trashing of creation. A series of images exploring the follow quote from George Monbiot:

'Our consumption is trashing a natural world infinitely more fascinating and intricate that the stuff we produce' (2.10.14)

A visual confrontation/articulation of the destruction of the wonder of the world.

A related theme, explored in the sand painting, is the fragility and transience of life. 

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4. The human body as an emanation of life

Classical texts for Indian artists dictated that the artist's line in painting a body had to be executed in such a way that it was possible to distinguish a living body from a corpse. Whereas in the Graeco/Roman tradition (which still informs EuroAmerican aesthetics today) the emphasis was on accuracy of anatomical detail, the Indian painter was concerned with portraying the movement of prana  (breath) through the living body.

The body as the container of a continually emerging life force

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5. Alankara: beauty and ornament as protection. In classical Indian aesthetics, jewellery, perfumes, colours and other forms of body ornamentation were not seen as superfluous extras, but as conferring power and protection on the wearer (beautifully explored in 'The Body Adorned' by Vidya Dehejia).

Human creativity as a foil against the dark. 

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6. Something about proportion and measurement

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Putting all this another way, I'm interested in painting, performance, and activities that explore, highlight, or celebrate the following:


1. The miracle of the biological form that is the body

2. The body as a fractal emanation of planetary life processes; not just 'connected to' those life processes, but a manifestation of them; an embodiment of life energy

3. The extraordinariness of biological and physical life

4. The transience and preciousness of biological and physical life; for the individual, for the group, for the environment, for the planet

5. Creativity as an expression of life energy: dance, song, painting, poetry, comedy, performance, movement - not as 'talented' celebrities but as a means of connecting with self and community

'Becoming an artist consists of learning to accept yourself, which makes your work personal...'

'But while talent - not to mention fate, luck and tragedy - all play their role in human destiny, they hardly rank as dependable tools for advancing your own art on a day-to-day basis. Here in the day-to-day world (which is, after all, the only one we live in), the job of getting on with your work turns upon making some basic assumptions about human nature, assumptions that place the power (and hence the responsibility) for your actions in your own hands. Some of these can be stated directly:

ARTMAKING INVOLVES SKILLS THAT CAN BE LEARNED. The conventional wisdom here is that while 'craft' can be taught, 'art' remains a magical gift bestowed only by the gods. Not so. In large measure becoming an artist consists of learning to accept yourself, which makes your work personal, and in following your own voice, which makes your work distinctive...'

David Bayles & Ted Orland, Art and Fear

I'm thinking about this today in relation to something that Paul Oertel says on his new CD, Reflections on Artistic Expression. My notes from listening to this say:

'The more specific you can become, the more the universal is revealed... 

(you get to) something that is real...not something that is limited in scope...'



There's something very important and complicated in the idea of a personal that does not make the observer/viewer/listener feel like a voyeur.

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content arising

Content continues to arise. Through arising content I begin to find my way back in, after a period of personal disruption.

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'When I get busy, I get stupid'

'I think it's good to have a lot of projects going at once so you can bounce between them. When you get sick of one project, move over to another, and when you're sick of that one, move back to the project you left. Practice productive procrastination.

Take time to be bored. One time I heard a coworker say, 'When I get busy, I get stupid'. Ain't that the truth. Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. I get some of my best ideas when I'm bored, which is why I never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts - it's so boring, I almost always get good ideas. If you're out of ideas, wash dishes. Take a really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maira Kalman says, 'Avoiding work is the way I focus my mind'.

Take time to mess around. Get lost. Wander. You never know where it's going to lead you.'

Austin Kleon

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on not representing things

Throughout my life I have struggled as much with the idea of 'representational/figurative' as I have with 'non-representational/abstract'.

Here are two drawings from 1980.

There was a satisfaction in working with these shapes and tones, and making compositional choices. But something was wrong. Not wrong in the sense that people who make this kind of drawing are in any way mistaken, but wrong for me; wrong for my purpose (unknown).

When I went to India to work in the mid 1980s, I wasn't doing much. But after a few days of sitting in my roof top room looking at the monsoon clouds hovering above the valley below, I felt something move.

Being there unlocked a kind of magical freedom. Every day I drew continuously (in the sense that I just started drawing and didn't stop, my pencil never leaving the page) and without thought. My line seemed to have finally broken free.

But one day I had to leave, and the line went back into its cage. Nothing happened after that for a long time.

I was left, though, with a sense of the spirit of the free line. Later I would study Indian, Chinese and Japanese art and find out about a different aesthetic. A different purpose for art. Not for individual expression. Not for the representation of externally observable forms. This art was motivated by a more internal impulse, a desire to make the viewer feel the energy and flow of life itself

In the many twists and turns that followed, I never gave up the idea of somehow finding a way to make art that expressed this feeling of life. But I could never see a way to do it. Every time I drew something that was in front of me, a 'representational' drawing, it felt dead, lifeless. Every time I tried to go away from the representational, it felt pointless.  In the end I gave up.

How I found my way back is another story. In the end life found a way to come through when I wasn't looking, crept in by the back door.

This reminiscing was prompted by my making a 'representational' painting of the horizon a day or so ago. I didn't paint what was in front of me.  I looked at the sea for a long time. Then I came home and painted how it lived in my memory, how it felt.

It still looked like a bit of a pointless representational image ('Why do that? Hundreds of thousands of artists make paintings of the sea every day. There are enough people working on that, and most of them will make more interesting images than me'). It's not that I'm 'trying to be original'. I just bore myself. I want to make an image that interests me, an image that surprises me...

So I made a new kind of image from the painting.

That would do for that day.

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