You Are Your Art

One of the beautiful things about the creative process is how intertwined it is with our own personal growth. Our work improves in proportion to our own development as an artist. Perhaps that’s why creation can captivate us so — it’s really about our favorite subject, ourselves.

As we traverse any landscape of imagination, a bit of our life experience seeps in — how could it not? We decide which elements to obsess over and which to ignore. We argue vehemently for one direction, yet let another decision glide past without notice. How do we make these choices?

Lest we think we think we have our cognitive hands on the wheel, we should revisit human behavior under the bright light of emotion. As Jonathan Haidt brilliantly noted, we are the rational rider on a tempestuous elephant — tug on the reigns as we might, we go where the elephant tells us to go. [1]

In the artistic process, we are less the painter and more the light. Not separate from our creation, but an integral part of it — unnoticed by the amateur, but there nonetheless. We exist inside our work, which is perhaps why shipping is so important to us and why unfinished projects are viscerally painful. In some small way, we live on by sharing our work. Fused with our creation, the self has transcended its container, and for a brief moment, perhaps immortality is possible.

This awareness of our inherent connection to our work also enables us to let go of creative control. As in life, we can’t keep the moon in view by hitching it to a post — so to is the process of animating ideas. We must follow the ideas where they lead.

Adam Savage of MythBusters and Savage Builds and sums this up nicely:

“The workspace is a holy space where we get to confront ourselves. Ultimately when we’re moving past the obstacles that we encounter were moving past our own biases, our own preconceptions. We are dealing with the fact that the Project’s never going to go where we think it’s going to go and the real trick for us is to follow it where it’s going to go and that within that, the respect for that dichotomy to me is everything.” — Adam Savage

Create yes, by all means, create, but don’t forget, you’re not just the creator, but also, through the generous act of pouring yourself into the world, the created.

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Footnotes:

1. The book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath has a nice summary of the concept. “Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader. But the Rider’s control is precarious because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant. Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose. He’s completely overmatched.”