Did you ever notice how working out
in your studio and working out at a gym are much the same? If
you fall off that horse, you have to walk quite a ways until
you can catch the ride again. When you work the muscle of your
imagination and creativity, you feel the strength of it when
you rely on this most essential of studio supplies. However,
without daily exercise, this muscle quickly atrophies and a more
barren and hopeless place I cannot imagine.
Of course, the way out is also the same as the
gym. You simply have to start again. Put on the workout togs,
make it a priority, and feel like crap for a few days or weeks
(depending on how long it's been) until you regain the strength
and tone once more.
I'm sure there are as many ways for braving these
rough waters as there are artists in the world and one of my
favorites is to engage in horizontal thinking. For years, I've
resorted to looking elsewhere, outside my comfort zone,
for a jump-start, but never had I given it a name. However, while
reading "Train of Thoughts" by John Lenker, an essential book
for any web designer (which I am in my daily life to pay the
mortgage), I came across this passage:
"07.00.02 We need
something from outside our own experience to spark our insight
in a way that wouldn't
occur to us otherwise. The search for this spark is known as
horizontal thinking and is where we get the notion of 'thinking
outside the box.' Picture it in geological terms. If you're
interested in mining for gold, you generally wouldn't start
in your own backyard. You search across the horizontal plane
of the earth until you find a place that seems like it might
have potential. You then begin digging. If you have no luck,
you search for another place and dig again -- taking into consideration
the lessons that were learned in the previous attempt. The
process continues iteratively until you zero in on the right
location and begin digging vertically until you strike it rich!"
I wonder if this process is essentially what I
do everyday in the studio. And that during those times when I have
digressed into other daily activities and NOT been painting,
that the memory of previous attempts has faded and leaves me
in a state with no past doomed to start again. And the only thing
I can do is to pull out the map, grab that heavy shovel, and
go out searching. |
