I have never thought doing what you love would be this hard sometimes. Being an artist is being you. Visualising your thoughts and ideas and sharing them with the world is a very onerous process. I jumped off a smooth (but not rewarding) track of a career in the financial industry to pursue my true passion in my early 30s. For someone who was so used to living up to the expectations of others and society, I have really struggled, and still am struggling, with walking on a wild path as an artist.
Artists are treasure hunters
Making work for me is very much intertwined with reconnecting with my roots as a Japanese person and reinvestigating my cultural identity. The relationship with nature is the underlying tradition in the Japanese way of life and that is what I explore in my work. I was very surprised that being an artist was so much about getting to know myself. For any artists, whatever the subjects or the ideas, your work is your interpretations and your visualisations of them - all the ingredients are inside you. Being an artist is like constantly hunting for an unknown treasure. An artist her/himself has to decide what the treasure is and bring it out to the world. Resilience is one thing, but also trusting yourself is what an artist needs to master. I was so used to relying on external measures to validate myself, whether that is monetary reward or reputation. I had to recalibrate my inner compass and draw my own map using my judgements. Most of the time I feel like I am chasing an elusive and intangible treasure.
Creativity and curiosity are our superpowers
Recently I was very stuck with my work. I had already spent 6 weeks not being able to make anything I remotely liked. I could not see how I made anything before. Then a question came to my mind: am I trying to be productive? Somehow I had become a factory director trying to streamline the process and produce a series of work in the shortest time period. I had stopped listening to my true desire to make work. Productivity and efficiency are the worst enemies of artists - creative process needs to be nurtured organically. Creativity and curiosity are humans’ superpower but most of us are trained and encouraged not to use them in order to be productive and efficient. It is not surprising then that being an artist is challenging. Not only do we need to restore and follow our superpowers but also we have to persuade capitalists, consumer-centric and competition-over-cooperation society to see the value.
Ideal vs Reality
It is not easy to maintain idyllic state of mind to support creativity in reality. I do want to make economic sense about my practice. It is just so easy to be pulled into more tangible, quantifying, box-ticking ways of assessing my practice. One way for me to maintain the balance is to protect my time in my studio from unnecessary noise and disruption. I have a “not-to-do list” in the studio - do not check social media, do not google, do not listen to podcasts all the time, do not check emails etc. Nothing unusual but limiting unwanted input during my studio time helps me to stay in tune with my curiosity and creativity.
Undoing is as powerful as doing
When I observe nature, I notice how good the rest of the beings on the earth is to leave space or not doing something all the time. We need a blank time and space for ideas to grow and take their own root. We have to trust that we all have seeds inside that can flourish but if we constantly “do” things and keep on filling ourselves up with other people’s ideas, our own seeds have no space to sprout. It is difficult to protect the space - I feel guilty not doing anything and it feels such a luxury and of course social media is so tempting. But I try my best to have 20-30 min on my own, no input, just with my thought every day.
As I write this I feel I am finally, slowly coming out of the 7-week long state of “being stuck”, realising and reminding myself again that I am in for the creative process and not just end products, and also that it takes time to make work. I am grateful for this opportunity to write. My head is not this sorted all the time obviously, hence the struggles but it is a relief that I have somewhere in me to be able to think kindly about my art practice and feel really good about being an artist.
To “unstuck” I….
Listen to the podcast: https://hurryslowly.co - rethinking about “productivity”
Read “Clear Seeing Place” by Brain Rutenburg // “Living and Sustaining a Creative Life” by 40 working artists
Write in response to the prompts in Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
Meet other artist friends for honest chat
Hang out in Waterstone flagship store on Piccadilly street or any bookshop really!
