On the reasons why we make art
Or: Tracing the germ. Just where did the urge for art making even come from?
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From what mysterious place in us does our most inspired work emerge? I believe from some creative intelligence that resides beneath our intellect, a close neighbour to the place where our worst impulses are born.
- Melissa Febos, Body Work
Arriving in my hometown of Sydney, I am embraced into warm sunshine by day and settled into my childhood bedroom by night. This is bittersweet; I have learned the hard way that once you leave, you never can truly go home again. At least, not in the way you thought you might. Old patterns and behaviours that you assumed you had gladly relinquished will start to resurface — though they feel discordant precisely because you know, on some level, you’re supposed to have outgrown them. And yet, they’ve made you who you are. This never lessens the shock of discovering an old anger, an old sadness, or some other discarded pain is waiting for you, like pulling on a shrunken sweater. It still kinda fits, but it kinda fits wrong. Still, it’s your sweater.
In the 10 years since I moved to the UK, so much in my home city has changed and yet, nothing has changed. All you who have been displaced or moved far from home will know exactly what I mean by this. The art community in Australia is fairly small, compared to the UK, and remains so. Growing up, I felt there was very little encouragement when it came to wanting to write — it’s just not a ‘proper job’ in the way that is expected. Being a first generation Australian came with some sense that there was still a hustle ahead. What good would writing stories be in this effort?
And so returning here always sparks a lot of confusing feelings, of feeling trapped, rejected, strange. And yet, it also comes with the love and warmth of family, familiarity and nostalgia. Two things can be true at once.
All this uncanniness has got me thinking about where the urge to make things even came from, in my own personal history. After all, the easier and cleaner route would have been to go ‘do a normal job’ the way the society (and my nerdy love of school) implied I should. I had the academic marks and the social pressure that would suggest a more conventional route. I tried to take it and yet, here we are. Where does the urge to do an artist’s work even come from?
Is it defiance?
I think often about the English teacher who, when I told them that I wanted to write, said to my parents: ‘She’s all talk and no action.’ I was just 13 years old. Who says this to an impressionable young teenager? The person whose encouragement I most needed, at the time, apparently. This would become a bias that would be hard to shake for over a decade.
The words that adults (especially teachers) say to kids will stay with them. When you’re not the most naturally self-confident, it can be hard for such narratives to do anything other than define you negatively. I came across this video recently featuring Jennifer Aniston saying something rather similar:
There’s a reason the phrase said by my English teacher stayed with me, too, well into adulthood. But I am not all talk and no action. In fact, I think I’ve been fairly consistent for some years when it’s come to honing my craft and going after what I want. I’d be lying if I didn’t say defiance drove me here. And while I wouldn’t wish for anyone to be harmed by the stories their elders tell them (irresponsibly) as children, defiance can be a way to get started - if the urge to defy is one that you possess.
In my case, there was a use to being a contrarian in this regard. Born from this urge to prove someone wrong came the urge to do things, and defy expectations. For me, this urge has not sustained me and it certainly hasn’t helped in times of trouble with the process. But it definitely lit the match.
Perhaps then it is for love and pleasure in the thing?
I want to say that the primary reason I write is out of sheer love for and pleasure in the act. I think this is true the majority of the time. But pure love is never enough - not for a practice so uncertain as art making. This work is hard. bell hooks talks about the difficulty inherent in the craft in her essay on the creative process in Art on my Mind:
Writing is my passion. But it is not an easy passion. It does not shelter or comfort me. Words try me — work me as though I am caught in a moment of spirit possession where forces beyond my control inhabit and take me, sometimes against my will, to places, landscapes of thoughts and ideas, I never wanted to journey to or see. I have never been a girl for travel.
- bell hooks in Art on my Mind
While I don’t believe in the idea of suffering as essential to the artist’s mystique (in short, I think it’s performative, pointless and unfair), I well understand the difficulty involved in creating something. The words ‘try me’ too. But where defiance might have lit the match at a crucial moment, love and pleasure in the work brings me back to the desk day after day.
Of course I love the work. I might have done almost anything else. My history suggests I ought to have done so. So if it isn’t mere defiance, and it isn’t only love, then why?
On remaining fundamentally hopeful
Why create? Or in my case: Why write?
Margaret Atwood asked this question of some writing students of hers and recorded their answers in On Writers and Writing:
To record the world as it is. To set down the past before it is all forgotten… To satisfy my desire for revenge… Because to write is to take risks, and it is only by taking risks that we know we are alive… To please myself. To express myself… To hold a mirror up to the reader… Because I was possessed. Because an angel dictated to me…
- Margaret Atwood, On Writers and Writing
There is no right answer here. In pursuing art, I please myself, I express something that feels true, I engage with the world, I remember, I take risks, I grow and I connect. This is as close to a spiritual mode as I can access. The need to form a part of something bigger than myself - be it history, language, the human species, whatever - is a powerful germ indeed that can soon infect every element of a life. My art making is synonymous with my living. As I live this process, it is challenging to distinguish myself from the work, but equally, I define myself better through what I have done. For me, this makes more sense than anything else I have pursued in my time on this planet.
As Anaïs Nin suggested, great things can come from the desire to balance out the excesses we ourselves have experienced — the extreme emotions, situations, etc. However, I still believe great things come as often from quieter urges — from the mundane and overlooked corners of human life (harking back to my oft quoted line from Art & Fear about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary). Whatever we have internalised is remade through the process of creation. We make and remake ourselves alongside the things we produce.
For me, the urge to write will never leave me. I know this, even though I don’t know where this path is headed. I hope I still have a lot of life ahead of me, and if I do, then I know there will be many highs and lows to come. But when I look back at everything that has formed a part of this journey so far, I see that there was always a mix of defiance and devotion in my approach. A desire to join something bigger and be subsumed by it, while also wishing to cut against the grain and carve out my vision from the words at my disposal.
Something that I struggled with as a child was this sense from some who seemed older and wiser than myself that artmaking was a slightly hopeless pursuit. It wasn’t a career, said some, or it wouldn’t make money, said others. It would be a difficult path, with an unlikely future built upon a bizarre risk. I do not blame the adults who told me these things — all of this is true. Except for one thing: Artmaking is not hopeless.
If we do not believe in other people or the world, we don’t make things. Why would you? Who would you be making them for? Artists are not always dreamers as such. But their work is, at its core, hopeful. This hope can be extinguished and we have seen how much suffering this causes, and how many talented souls have left us as a result of this loss of hope. But to make something beautiful and to share it is, to me, amongst the most hopeful acts one human can manage. To quote Natalie Goldberg:
The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world, and why not finally carry that secret out with our bodies into the living rooms and porches, backyards and grocery stores? Let the whole thing flower: the poem and the person writing the poem. And let us always be kind in this world.
– Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones
A final word and the fundamental question
I have had more than one person re-emerge in recent years to say, “I knew you’d be a writer someday.” That’s nice, I guess. Perhaps I’d have had an easier time of things if they’d mentioned it to me at some point. But that’s okay. It doesn’t matter. I am who I am. And what’s more, I’d argue I haven’t done all that much just yet. I’m only really at the beginning of something. After all, if I am lucky enough to live to a ripe old age, then there is so much living still to do. And my craft, alongside my life, will mature. It will change. I will change.
I don’t know everything there is to know about this process, because I do not know everything that there is to know about my life. But I suspect that being an artist will often mean holding two things in uneasy harmony: uncertainty and hopefulness. One in each hand, forever, until my time is up.
Why am I an artist? Because I love the world, I love myself, and I continue to be hopeful.
What about you?
Until next time,
Be well.
CCx