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Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way: https://juliacameronlive.com/books-by-julia/the-artists-way-a-spiritual-path-to-higher-creativity-audiobook/
This episode of Audacity Works pulls back the curtain on the often obscured challenges artists face, especially when venturing into unrestricted creative opportunities like residencies. From the weight of high expectations to the struggle to connect with their inspiration, we delve into the deep dark nasty of art-making. The episode was inspired by the journey of a young artist I mentored during her residency, with her blessing.
We'll touch on the importance of surrender and humility in the process of art-making, the oft-unspoken acceptance of unexpected twists and turns, and the normalcy of emotions like grief and confusion that permeate the creative process. I'll tell you about a particularly challenging residency of my own, sharing how I had to confront and process a garbage fire of emotional baggage before I could do a single damn productive thing. This episode is a sincere and thought-provoking discourse on art-making and creativity, urging artists to embrace the entirety of their journey, including the shadows.
Don't go back to sleep.
xoRachel
Sign up here for monthly blasts and functional woo
Find me on Instagram
Support this podcast on Patreon
Sign up for the newsletter: https://rachelstricklandcreative.ck.page/
Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way: https://juliacameronlive.com/books-by-julia/the-artists-way-a-spiritual-path-to-higher-creativity-audiobook/
This episode of Audacity Works pulls back the curtain on the often obscured challenges artists face, especially when venturing into unrestricted creative opportunities like residencies. From the weight of high expectations to the struggle to connect with their inspiration, we delve into the deep dark nasty of art-making. The episode was inspired by the journey of a young artist I mentored during her residency, with her blessing.
We'll touch on the importance of surrender and humility in the process of art-making, the oft-unspoken acceptance of unexpected twists and turns, and the normalcy of emotions like grief and confusion that permeate the creative process. I'll tell you about a particularly challenging residency of my own, sharing how I had to confront and process a garbage fire of emotional baggage before I could do a single damn productive thing. This episode is a sincere and thought-provoking discourse on art-making and creativity, urging artists to embrace the entirety of their journey, including the shadows.
Don't go back to sleep.
xoRachel
Sign up here for monthly blasts and functional woo
Find me on Instagram
Support this podcast on Patreon
Welcome to Audacity Works, a podcast inspired by and dedicated to the working artist, the creative entrepreneur and generally doing the damn thing. This exists on the premise that the world belongs to those who have the audacity to believe that their lives have value. This is for you. Welcome to Audacity Works. I am your host, rachel Strickland, and this is episode number 54, in which we're going to kind of continue our talks about creating into the void and really the shadow side of creating art, of art making, particularly when it's not going the way you thought that it would. So, first off, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who wrote in about restorative practices and added to that list and also added to the list of pleasures. Well, frankly, it's a pleasure reading what you have written and just reading your replies and helping to create what's actually become a pretty extraordinary resource. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to publish these lists again in my next newsletter, because last time, I think I gave you 24 hours to get on the mailing list and that's just not enough time for a lot of people. So I'm letting you know now if you want to have access to the big list of pleasures and the big list of restorative practices and I do recommend it then I'm going to put the link in the show notes and you just hop on over there, put in your email. Next time I send out a newsletter I will be sure to include that and then if you don't like anything else, you just unsubscribe. I don't care, I won't even notice, but if you do want to have access to those things, it really is. It's a lovely resource and I love looking at it. It's given me so many ideas I never would have thought of on my own. So that's what I'm going to do next. So go on, check the show notes if you like, and that's going to be made available to you. On the next newsletter, when is that going to be? I don't know. Maybe December 1st. Maybe I won't send out a new newsletter until December 1st when I do Woo Corner, I don't know.
Speaker 1:And I do get for anyone who is interested in email marketing, or you feel like you need to have a presence, an email list, but you don't know how often to write. I get asked pretty often like what? Do you have a schedule for yourself or what? And I do, and that schedule is near the first of every month I send out Woo Corner. Other than that, I don't have a schedule. If I get an idea, I write an email. If I have something I want to say something to my email list, I want to hear from them, I send an email. I've kept this list going for years and planned to continue to do so, and to me it's a sacred relationship. So, just like when I want to talk to a friend, I message my friend. When I want to talk to my email list, I email my email list. And just to keep myself accountable, I have Woo Corner to report near the first of every month. So that's, that's that story.
Speaker 1:But today's episode is inspired by something that actually happened. This morning I was speaking with a young woman. Internationally, we're on Zoom and we had set up some mentorship time and that's one of the ways that I work with people, one on one. And in this case she had gotten some funding to do a residency and she asked me to mentor her, which means we meet for an hour on usually it's each day that she's participating in the residency to have someone to talk to, one to talk about her ideas, give her some direction, give her some homework and facilitate her work unfolding. This is something that I love to do and I've worked with this particular artist several times and she's just brilliant and it's just so much fun to work with her. So of course I said, yes, there we are. Finally, the residency has arrived for her. We hop on the Zoom call and she is not having an easy time of it.
Speaker 1:And here's the thing about residencies and other opportunities that give us designated periods of time to really sink our teeth into a creative project or into our creative work, whether it's an aerial residency or writing residency, or you just like go away somewhere to be alone for a few days and think about shit, you know, think about what you want to make, how you want to make it, and give yourself that time. There's so much anticipation that's built up around it, because oftentimes daily life is not conducive to that deep work. And it is deep work and it does take time and focus. And if you can't build time and focus into your daily life, then you find ways of doing that that are in more bite sized chunks, like residency or going away for a few days or just turning off your phone for the weekend. Even so, by the time this period of time rolls around.
Speaker 1:There's been a lot of anticipation and dangerously a great deal of expectation placed upon this time. And you go in there and since you've been rushing around, you've been living your daily life, you've been taking care of business. And then you get there into the studio or into the space or wherever, and you're like, okay, lay it on me, muse. And the Muse just sort of like, looks at you from the corner with this freaked out look deer in headlights, and he's like what, me now what? And you expect that you're going to just be, you know, overwhelmed with inspiration because you've been set free into this period of time where you just get to create no holds barred. The expectation is there, but the Muse didn't get the memo. Or even if she did get the memo, she's like I don't operate on your mundane human schedule, I'm an effervescent being of the cosmos that also happens to live inside the electricity in your brain.
Speaker 1:This is not a unique experience. I want to make that clear. It's a pretty common experience and it's kind of. You know that, that ol axiom it's like well, it's something that happens to other people but it's not going to happen to me, and then it totally happens to you Ask me how I know. And the thing is about being in this space and realizing that you you actually have a shit ton of processing to do before you can even begin to create something, because you've been living your daily life and not processing and you're in this space and you want to make use of the space. You have expectations for how you're going to make use of the space, but instead you're faced with all this other shit that hasn't been done yet and, frankly, it's humiliating because we think that we should be past it. We think that we should be more developed in this, and the reason I know this so poignantly is because I just experienced it.
Speaker 1:In June I went away pretty much locally and I had a residency just outside of where I live for I don't know four or five nights and I had been working and working and just waiting. I was so excited and I finally got there and I unpacked and I sat down and I was like fuck, I've got grief. Oh shit, didn't realize, and you know, because I hadn't allowed myself to realize and there I was with this time and I wanted that time to be super productive and super valuable. And you know what, sometimes we don't get to be in charge of that shit. And even if we were, imagine that. Imagine that you do have a lot of emotional shit that you need to process and you haven't had time or given yourself time to do that. And then you get to your residency or to this space of designated time and focus and you do make something super productive and everything goes swimmingly and then you pop it on the shelf and it's available for sale. Perhaps Is that satisfying to you. Do you feel that you did your due diligence to the muse and to yourself to truly investigate this concept? And please don't understand me, I am not saying that art equals suffering. That is bullshit.
Speaker 1:But making art is hard. Magic is easy. Making art is difficult. It's very demanding of you. It requires a lot of you, an enormous emotional labor load of you, often Not always, but often and I think it can be so infuriating. It can be so infuriating because a lot of other things that we take on in our lives don't operate this way. Like, making art is not the same as building a business, for example. They both take consistency and showing up over and over again. But when it comes to building a business, you are in charge and, yeah, there's usually some emotional shit to deal with, but there's strategy as well, and you can have strategy and you can have time and you can have focus when it comes to creating a piece of art.
Speaker 1:But there's also this element of surrender that happens in art making, because we aren't the only cooks in the kitchen and I know that this is getting like a little woo, but it is functional woo, which is the only kind that I enjoy. But when we set out to engage in art making, we aren't the only beings in the room, and I'm not saying like your dead grandma is there, or even that there's like a guardian angel there. I don't know, but in whatever form she takes, the muse is there, and that requires some element of surrender and humility, and I think humility as a quality is vastly overrated in society, particularly among AFAB people. But I'm not talking about humility in society. I'm talking about humility when faced with your own creative force, and I think that's partially.
Speaker 1:What's wonderful about art making is that there are surprises and you do learn a lot about yourself, and there are very unexpected things that you discover on the way. It's not even just creating a finished product, and there've been so many times, often when an artist has been like, truly humbled by their own creative process and it just didn't go the way they expected and nothing's working the way they thought that it would, and they feel like they should be more advanced or something and not have to deal with these hurdles that they're facing. And it's embarrassing, and they don't really want it, talk about it or admit it, but when it does come up, I think it is helpful to be reminded that being humbled in the face of a goddess is an appropriate reaction and by goddess I mean, of course, you and your muse, and I do feminize it and humanize it, because that's how I experience it. But when being confronted by your own creative process, to be humbled in that process and surprised by that process is a pretty appropriate response, I think. So these are just a bunch of words to tell you no, it's not just you, and there's nothing wrong with you and you're fine.
Speaker 1:The only way out is indeed through, and all of these things that I'm discussing are really specific to art making and a creative practice, particularly if that creative practice has been neglected, which it often is, because, like we mentioned earlier, daily life is not really conducive to art making and to deep work, unless we design it in a very specific way. I was talking to a friend about a month ago who was having sort of a personal renaissance in his own creative practice and at first he was really inspired and it felt great and he found he felt that sense of joy that we hear about in relation to creating something. And then that joy was accompanied by a very deep melancholy and it was really confusing for him and we were talking about it and I was just assuring him that that's pretty normal. In fact, julia Cameron points this out in her book the Artist's Way, which is a 12, it's like a 12 step program. It is a 12 chapter book for artists to investigate their own creativity. Lots of exercises to do. Don't try to do them all, just do the ones that seem like fun to you, but I do recommend it, particularly if you go through it with with like a buddy. You go through the experience together, but anyway at some point.
Speaker 1:Julia Cameron tells us that it is very common when an artist sort of reawakens from a time of slumber, it's very, very common to experience grief for the lost time not wasted time, although that word gets thrown around a lot, but the lost time, the time that you feel like you could have been pushing more into your creative practice, perhaps uncovering new ground, and you didn't because you couldn't for this reason or that reason. And I think that grief is very valid and, like all grief, you never know what you're going to get. Grief is a very unruly house guest. They don't. It doesn't behave the way you think it's going to, it's not linear, it's not predictable, it shows up at inopportune times and when it shows up, not a whole lot else gets done because it's kind of loud. And really I think the whole, the crux of the matter that I'm trying to get to is that it wasn't an isn't wasted time or any other kind of nonsense that we get from societal conditioning. That's the problem.
Speaker 1:But our expectations for what our creative practice is going to feel like, particularly when we get some designated time and space to focus on it the expectation causes cognitive dissonance. This is particularly true if, in your artwork, you want to investigate something like joy Awesome, cool, that's, yeah, great concept. I fucking love it. There's a lot of work that's about the opposite of that and those are totally valid too. But when you set out to investigate joy. You have an expectation of experiencing that joy, and then it feels like someone peed in your cornflakes when you get into the studio and you feel a bunch of grief, or you feel melancholy, or you feel bored, and then it's just this constant striving like, okay, I need to get to a place where I feel joy. I need to get to a place where I feel joy, and that's a really difficult thing to do. You know, joy is a tall order and it's kind of a loaded word.
Speaker 1:So, going back to this young woman that I was meeting with earlier this morning, what I said to her and I wanted to repeat to all of you is that if the metric of success is joy, that's a pretty tall order, but if it works, great. And if it doesn't work, why don't we change the metric to just fucking be an interested? What if the metric for this is working, the work is developing, the time that I'm spending developing this concept is being successful? What if that metric was just I'm interested in what I'm doing, I'm fascinated in what I'm doing and I love all the conversations that we've been having lately around pleasure and restorative practices, and I'm going to stay in this place where I encourage you to live your joy and share your joy and have joy.
Speaker 1:But when we are trying to, like, manipulate ourselves into a state of joy, it's kind of disappointing, particularly in art making, when you're making a piece of work about something that isn't necessarily joyful, like we want to feel, that sort of flow state and we've talked about this before and when we can't access that state in the way that we expect it to arrive, we're disappointed. So if this is happening to you and the whole point of this whole podcast episode is just to say if you're disappointed in what you're experiencing in your creative practice, can we just go back to what is interesting and not what would be interesting to someone else or not? What would an agent like to see, or what might someone like to book? Fuck all that shit. Just what is interesting to you Now, the way you are now, who you are right now it's a lot easier to access that feeling of like, well, that's fucking interesting, just so much more accessible than I'm feeling. Cosmic joy, love that for you. If that's happening for you, just keep doing what you're doing. But for the times where that's not super accessible, just access what the fuck is interesting, what's interesting, what's fascinating.
Speaker 1:Looking at the time, I'm going to wrap this up. I want to thank you for letting me yammer into your ear for 20 minutes, and if you have requests for future episodes, I would love to hear them. You can find me on Instagram, at Rachel Strickland Creative, or on Patreon at Rachel Strickland Creative. Gotta give a shout out to my patrons for making this possible and this and so many more things that I do possible. Thank you for standing with me. Until next time, my friends, be brave, be bold and just be interested. It's enough. It's enough. Don't go back to sleep.