gifts of time and motivation

This is worth your time. It's a blog entry about the issue we artmakers have with MAKING MASTERPIECES. We can all relate to this, right? The perfectionism in us to make things remarkable, precise, unique.

He writes: "This will correct itself soon - the school year ends this week and I have a show in Edmonton in late August, so I will have the combined gifts of time and motivation. I will get back into a routine in the studio, spend a couple of weeks making total crap, and then I'll get into a new onslaught of production that will finally expend itself, resulting in another dry spell. Unfortunately, knowing that this is coming is not going to stop me from making myself crazy about it. (Only hard exercise and meditation mitigates the crazy-making. My brain, by itself, will spin until it blows a gasket.)"

This reliable process interests me. We all do it, right? You go along making your thing, and you do it all the time. Wishin&hopin for the masterpiece, and when does it really happen? I find that like my dear Artblog blogger, the weight of a deadline hangs heavy. I’ll be going along on a normal pace, doing the same kind of work I always make, and then something happens…a spark! The spark impales my sensibilities and I am left in its wake, desperate to capture it, follow it into the light. I follow its path through the maze of wild virgin mossiness (meh. Is it not mossy for you? My world of creation is: moist, soft, lush&green tenderness) into the moment of INSPIRATION! Within that moment of spark it all makes sense. That light goes off and now it becomes an art to suck every last droplet of every last second before the deadline. Even after finding the spark it becomes yet another challenge to see if I am able to imbue it into the final work. Does it translate? Am I making it happen?

“It parallels Zen. Aspirants seek enlightenment, but practice moment-to-moment awareness. It turns out that you can't do much of anything else. If you sit down and try to will yourself into revelatory experiences, you figure out pretty quickly that it isn't going to work. Instead, you set off in the direction of enlightenment, and when you fall short, you neither kid yourself about it nor kill yourself over it. You get up, re-orient, and set off again. Dogen finally says that practice is enlightenment. What a useful attitude! Before he died, the Buddha said, "Be a lamp unto yourself." Shine the light into yourself and look.”

I love thinking about this. About the discipline of art. You sit on your artsy cushion over and over and over and over, painting your artsy pictures, and maybe ----- just maybe ----- you’ll get a glimpse of a masterpiece. You’ll get a moment of enlightened beingness. Enlightened artmaking. All you have to do is muster up some discipline and YOU TOO can be masterpiece making Buddha!

This is not to say that once you have become a proficient painter that suddenly you’re shooting out masterpieces as quickly as a 10th grader shoots out spitwads, but rather that disciplining yourself to consistently have “the gifts of time and motivation” puts you in the breeding grounds for greatness. The rehearsing of painting does not itself create masterful works, because truthfully, flickers of genius are always a surprise. EUREKA!

I want to say the process IS THE THING. I do. But it is like saying it’s all about foreplay. I mean…don’t get me wrong – foreplay is sweetfantastic, however there is NO underestimating the power of an earthshattering epic masterpiece of an orgasm!

My art process is divine: flipping through glossy mags cutting out gorgeous women’s body parts and then gluing them somewhere. I mean c’mon! It’s a fetishist’s dreamland! When it comes down to it, I’m not usually even interested in MAKING the masterpiece. Just me and my clippings and I’m just dandy. I am making visual relationships because I need to. I pretty much don’t have a choice. This is the way my mind operates. It enlivens my soul.

I’m in it – genius sparks&fireworks or no. We can all revel in our pudding of creativity. Schloop! Schlop! Bask under your own lamp of genius! Your light shines radiant. I believe you can catch rays of remarkableness!