I’ve recently been overwhelmed by lots of small tasks. Getting back to people about workshops, responding to feedback about art for a book, doing various small home maintenance tasks and so on. These ‘bits’ of life shrapnel have been orbiting my brain for a while but each have never felt important enough to pluck them out of orbit and get them done. Always de-prioritised in favour of bigger things: new ideas, materials and art media to explore.
So, I made a list. Like a beachcomber collecting shells, I gathered all the disparate bits, put them in a line, and ticked them off, one at a time. And sure enough, the progress felt good. Lists work. I should make the more often.
I think that most people would describe a film by Quentin Dupieux as ‘weird’. I find them almost impossible to describe to someone else to a person unfamiliar with his work; someone who expects a ‘normal’ story.
Mr Dupieux’s films haven’t smashed box office records and most of them haven’t had a cinematic release here in Australia. Yet, they are made and I love them because they help me see and think differently about the world.
A Quentin Dupieux film hasn’t yet made anyone a billionaire and most people in the world wouldn’t have seen them. Of those that have seen them, most probably wouldn’t have enjoyed them or even ‘understand’ them. With that kind of expected response, why bother making them at all?
So, Dupieux could just dream up the ideas but never take the next step to make the films he makes because it would all just be too hard, to sell the idea and then to fund it. But, one of the lessons from Dupieux films is that it’s not always about commerce. It’s about saying something to someone else by working out what you think and feel through whatever medium helps you. Chances are if that process helps you, it might help someone else. Not everyone. But someone.
No matter how obscure or weird, if Quentin Dupieux follows through with ideas, maybe I should to. Like him, if I do it for long enough, some people, the right people, will probably notice and may even enjoy them.
It’s difficult to play a sport or a board game without rules; guides for things you can and can’t do, time limits, a definition of what’s in and out of bounds. These limits make the game or sport fun to play. The same goes with creative work.
I do my best work when I’m bound by rules: a deadline, a limited set of materials, a limited colour palette, a limited surface on which to create. All of these limits are useful boundaries that help guide and inform the choices about what I make and why.
You’d think that, to have more energy for creative work, one would need to conserve or ‘save it up’ from other areas of life. An ‘easy’ or ‘boring’ day job should mean that when I clock off at 5pm, I’m raring to go with creative energy for my own projects. But it doesn’t work that way.
It’s a bit like running a 40km marathon. I’m not more likely to run one well if, in preparation, I sat on the couch to conserve my energy for a week. I need to work up to it with consistent and routine work.
What my creative work seems to need is something comfortably uncomfortable. A day job that is stimulating, intellectual, and collaborative but with little emotional labour. This combination keeps my brain and heart warm so that when ‘personal’ time arrives, I’m more likely to be able to run the marathon it takes to make great art because I’ve already been on a slow jog.
I am growing fonder of in-person energy; that physical, three-dimensional, multi-sensory experience of another person. I find that I’m walking away from 1:1 encounters with more energy and enthusiasm for myself and my art practice. It doesn’t matter if I’ve been helped or if I’m the one who did the helping, it’s the same. I walk away ‘better’, more ‘full’. It’s the complete opposite feeling I have when I interact with someone online. So why would I do the latter?
Calling something ‘done’ is difficult. When I embark on a new art project, I have a loose idea of what ‘done’ could be. But there’s no specific, measurable, or consistent criteria.
One one hand, ambiguity is necessary because it provides space for natural curiosity that needs to be present in the process of making. Ambiguity allows discovery.
On the other hand, infinite discovery without closure leaves me with a feeling of stagnation, incompleteness, of circling but never coming down to land. That’s tiring.
Calling something ‘done’ means accepting, most often, imperfection. When something is done, it’s often not as good as I imagined it would be. It almost always never fully scratches the itch I had that made me begin the work in the first place.
But calling something ‘done’ gives me permission. Permission to stop, rest, come up for air, reflect, or learn something about myself and my work that I didn’t know before. It’s with *that* that I become better positioned to go on my next discovery; to further, deeper, and more interesting places than before.
There seems to be two ways I make marks. The first way is ‘competently’. This involves multiple pencil sketches to mould/sculpt a drawing to get it where I want it to be. The lines are sketchy, the paper is often rubbed raw with eraser marks, but the lines are where I imagined them to be. It also means there is often a ‘stiffness’ in the drawing.
The second way of approaching mark making is ‘confidently’. A single stroke, no erasing, just a mark on a page. If that mark lands where I intend it to, great! But it often doesn’t. Instead of reaching for the eraser, the process becomes more about how I react to that mark. With a ‘confident’ approach, the next mark needs to be one made in relation to what’s already on the page because it’s no longer about what I can see in my head, it’s only about what’s on the page.
The ‘confident’ approach means a ‘less accurate’ drawing compared to what I imagined it to be but it also means a more free/open/unpredictable drawing and for me, a more interesting one.
Perhaps if I spend more time practicing confident lines over competent ones, the confident ones may increasingly land where I intend them to and the best of both worlds will appear on the page.
Some days I’m too tired to write or draw. Some days I’ve got other things I need to do or would rather be doing. Some days, I just don’t feel like it. But that’s also true of when I show up to my day job except, I always do, and I get the work done, whether I feel like it or not. Maybe it’s the same with my art-making?
I’ve had certain ideas burning a hole in my brain for a while. I think they’re good ideas, but I’m not sure so I haven’t spent the energy on drawing them. They are ‘great ideas… in theory’.
Truth is, I’m afraid that when I start them, I’ll discover that I’m not up to the task: I don’t have the skills yet to realise them as well as I can imagine them. So, in some ways, it’s safer not to try. If I don’t try they can remain great ideas… in theory.
But ideas that aren’t made can’t be shared and ideas that can’t be shared don’t help anyone. They can’t inform or entertain an audience and without that, I don’t learn if that great idea in theory is also a great idea in reality.
If I try to realise a great idea and learn that I’m not skilled enough to translate that idea into reality, I will have learned something. But, if it turns out I am able to take that idea and make it well, I will have also learned something. By learning anything I will have more information to decide on what’s next; either develop the skills I don’t have so that I can make turn the idea into reality, or build on the success of the original work and make something even more ambitious next.
By taking the ‘risk’ of starting, exploring, and finishing, I’m better able to understand which great ideas (in theory) will make better ones in reality. Over time, that’s likely to lead to better & more interesting work that’s more likely to inform or entertain an audience. I like those chances.
A chair is for sitting, obviously. But then, what’s sitting for? Why sit at all? In fact, why me?
Sometimes, understanding ourselves – what we do and why we do it in the way that we do it – isn’t easy. The world is full of self-help books that promise to help a person discover their “why” or “purpose”. But this is where an older writer may be of use.
Aristotle’s four causes* may be a neat way to investigate any ‘why’ type of question. It may not be perfect, but it also may not need to be. For any ‘thing’ that exists (like a chair), Aristotle implores ask to us a few questions.
- What is it? Aristotle describes this as his ‘formal’ cause. In our case, well, we’ve already described it. A chair.
- What is it made of? Aristotle calls this his ‘material’ cause. If the chair I’m thinking about is a wooden chair, then it’s material cause is a tree..
- How did it go from wood to a chair? This is Aristotle’s ‘formal cause’. Or, ‘how did this chair form’. In the chair’s case, it required skills and labour of a furniture maker to transform a pile of wood into this chair..
- What is its good? Or, it’s ‘final cause’. In other words, why does this chair exist? Which brings us back to the original answer – for sitting, right? But then, what’s sitting for?.
The idea of following this thread of understanding the world better is that it’s a guide for helping us make more intentional and thoughtful decisions. In my case, I did just buy a new chair, and it was expensive, so shouldn’t I know what sitting is for?
Sitting, for me, is necessary to remain comfortable, to rest, and prevent injury. And why is this important? So that I can spend as much time making books and writing stories that inform or entertain people? Why? Because I believe that stories are the perfect vehicle to move hearts and minds towards things that I think are important in a community – kindness, compassion, generosity and patience. And, as I write those words, I may have stumbled across something that sounds like a purpose. An answer to the question, “why me?”
*It’s worth noting that the definition of ‘cause’ in Aristotle’s time is a little different to how we think about it today. Cause in Aristotle’s time was less about ‘causation’ and more about an ‘explanation’… a ‘why’.
