Portrait of the Artist
Developing a viable artistic practice can only come when we begin to accept who we are and choose the right mindset. Sounds simple enough, but it took over 30 years to reach this conclusion, much less accept it.
He said, “Just take this, move this, and do this over here. That’s all. We’ve got to get it done.”
Somewhere in corporate America, in a small office with white walls and a glass door covered with thin, opaque film, I was arguing with my boss about a presentation I had created at his request. He was one of those lean-type cats who moves fast and riddles the corporate landscape with “minimum viable products.” Now, I have nothing personal against the lean methodology or its practitioners — it is a fine way of doing things and has worked well for many. No sir, I have no problem with it at all…unless it stands in the way of delivering Quality creative work.
Like a museum patron trying to divine the answer to life from a painting on a wall, I took a few steps back and stroked my beard as I contemplated his choices. “No,” I said. “That won’t work.” Between you and me, I didn’t have the answer at that moment. But I knew that something better was out there. “I just need a little more time to work it through,” I said. “Besides, we’re still on schedule.”
“But let’s finish ahead of schedule.”
“Look, this process takes time. I want it to be great, not good enough. That’s the artist in me.” That last sentence had slipped out my mouth without any conscious effort.
He looked askance, the corners of his lips curling upward.
“An…an artist?” he scoffed. He choked on his smile, remained silent. I could tell he was carefully choosing between what he wanted to say and what an HR manager would approve of him saying. “Okay. Fine. You have till the end of the week.”
I walked out of the room, grinning. “An artist,” I could hear him muttering as the glass door thudded to a close behind me.
Even at the age of 37, at the moment I uttered the word “artist,” as a descriptor of myself, I wasn’t wholly convinced that it fit me. I had recently abandoned the contemporary noun-form of art for its root, verb form, meaning, “to put things together.” To me it was about the process, the work. But when it came to my view of artists, and of myself, I had taken the popular archetype of the artist as gospel, mostly because it was reinforced throughout my Creative Writing program.
You read that right. I actually majored in Creative Writing. And when you’re in a Creative Writing program, you read a lot of books, especially the classics. The classics nutritious for the brain and I highly recommend them, but they can inadvertently paint a certain picture of what it takes to be an artist and to create.
What I had observed through my reading was that pain was a prerequisite for making great art. To be an artist, you had to live with a great deal of pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, psychic pain — it didn’t really matter, so long as you suffered some sort of emotional disfigurement. And the power of the work was directly proportional to the total amount of pain that the artist experienced. Then there was the “real” art.
The “real” art, well, that required a lifetime of torment to construct, followed by a period of ascetic determination to force it from the darkness into the light. It could take years to truly capture it. And the whole affair left you spent and broken. This is why poets look so morose in their headshots.
As a young writer, I couldn’t live up to that ideal.
At that point in my life, I hadn’t experienced any of the common pain-inducing struggles that inspire great art: no poverty (though we weren’t rich); nobody died before their time; no maiming physically or emotionally; no thirst for the blood of wild game in the family; no relationships scarred me; my parents were still married (albeit the second marriage for both). While life wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t quite the proper breeding ground for great art.
Despite having practiced my craft for four years, it wasn’t long after I graduated college that I began my transformation into an artist. My future was uncertain; I didn’t see a place in contemporary society for a practiced writer. I didn’t feel compelled to go get my Masters degree. I didn’t know quite what to do next. Not seeing a clear way into the world, I slowly sank into a state of depression one day.
My god, I thought. How great for my art.
Not long after, I lost my sense of humor. Then I knew I was in real trouble.
LIfe’s simplest tasks felt like arduous undertakings, as if I were climbing Everest without any enthusiasm for the task. I lacked clarity in my thinking, and writing a coherent sentence, much less a paragraph, became damn near impossible. All I could produce was some non-sensical babble not worthy of the ink which it was written. I was in deep.
And yet, somehow, I had the wherewithal to know that I had to change. I was already outside my body, and looking back on my current situation, I knew it wasn’t working. If I allowed it to determine my fate, I’d lose everything that was important to me — friends, goals, my wife. That realization was enough to convince me that I had to own this experience and learn from it.
Through sheer determination, meditation, self-awareness, lifestyle changes, and a little medicinal help from my doctor, I made my escape. My return to lucidity was the result of a long process of retraining my brain. I’ve always been a deep thinker, but I hadn’t given much thought to the notion that a lot of my troubles were caused by the attitude that I approached life. Developing self-awareness forced me to confront the attitudes and behaviors that were standing in my way of becoming the next best version of myself.
For the first time, I began to see the best in people, to view the world as a place of possibility, to return to that child-like state of fascination that drove my hunger and desire to learn. I made decisions about how I wanted my life to be instead of having those decisions made for me. I ate when I was hungry, slept when I was tired, and exercised. I was committed to the idea of making positive changes in my life.
But, if depression was out, then what of my art?
I knew I had to rethink that as well. It didn’t take long to figure out that the archetype of the artist I had constructed in my head, like much of the thinking and subsequent action, was total bullshit. Much of that thinking came about in the years leading up to that depressed state. Like a diligent writer, I had to throw a lot of that away.
I finally saw the folly of my thinking. As I regained my good health, my work improved. I was doing a good bit of reading and meditating on my own experiences and began to understand that some of my views were not firmly rooted in reality. Instead, I had accepted what was popular, what was often portrayed in movies, the media, and in a few of the biographies of the writers I read. Elizabeth Gilbert calls this the “myth of creativity,” that you have to be tortured and broken to create art. I had accepted this distorted view by default instead of defining it for myself. So I started over.
I started by redefining the word “art.” Once I realized that art is action — the putting together of things — it immediately changed how I saw the artist.
I realized that Picasso was right. “Every one of us is born an artist. The challenge is to remain one when we grow up.” The capacity to create great art is inveterate in each of us. Because the definition of art is truly about the creating itself, art can extend across the full spectrum of our humanity. We’re all capable of creating the lives we want if we choose to accept and embrace the challenge.
An artist is anyone who’s engaged in a highly creative process, the end goal being to make something beautiful that didn’t previously exist. An artist can, in fact, be from anywhere in the world, take any shape or color, and perform any job from writing to crunching numbers on a spreadsheet to bagging groceries. What an artist possesses is a mindset, a fundamental way of viewing the world that drives them to see what’s possible and go after it.
Through enough patience and practice, you can change your brain to be a better artist. I learned this when I was in college, practicing my art every day. The vast majority of my time there was dedicated to putting my mind through artistic paces: think, do, reflect; think, do, reflect; etc. This became the foundation of my artistic practice and helped me to improve quickly. But I had gotten away from this practice, and things hadn’t gone well.
For me, the main form my art takes is my writing. Writing well requires throwing away more words than you’ll ever leave on the page. It’s the finding the words, arranging them on the page, then the continual work of cutting them until everything is expressed as clearly and succinctly as possible that becomes the real art. When I’m doing it well, I get lost in the process and don’t worry about what the world may think. I simply do. And the end result is beautiful.
Writing is one form of artistic expression, but it can also be through my flying, web design, or even the work that I do for other organizations. Each activity is approached with the same mindset and desire for ultimate outcome — to make something beautiful that didn’t exist. If I’m lucky, that action inspires others to go out and do the same.
In the end, what it all boils down to is this:
We all have the capacity to create something beautiful, some amazing work of art. But what we don’t realize is that the real art is the process of creating, the making, the fitting things together into something new, whether that’s an object or an experience.
An artist is anyone who’s engaged in this process of making anything beautiful that didn’t previously exist. It’s all about approaching the work with the right mindset and developing a practice that makes great work possible. If you master your personal creative process, then you will make incredible art, whatever form it takes.
And that’s what I endeavor to do.
Thanks for reading The Practicing Artist, my column on Medium. If you like what you read, spread the love. To read more stories — including fiction and facts about art, artists, aviation, philosophy, and maybe even a poem or two — check out my website, storyofthewind.com. You can also subscribe to my newsletter to stay connected.
