between the cracks: why art doesn’t have to be invasive to be inspirational
Every job that I’ve had for the last two years I have thought will be my last. I always envision that the hobbies I am attempting to monetize will take off like I’ve seen them do for other creators online. Well, I started a new job this week, and while I am incredibly excited about the work I’ll be doing (as it’s something I genuinely enjoy) I can’t help but feel that familiar prick of failure in the back of my mind.
But somewhere in the mix there is also relief. I don’t feel ready to pursue my own path quite as diligently as I would need to if I had no other source of income. I haven’t grown enough as a person or as an artist, and I am in a unique life situation that allows me to have enough time outside of a full-time job to pursue the things that I am passionate about.
But this unique situation leaves me with a predicament: my time is fragmented. Everyone is always talking about how work needs to be deep to be effective, how important it is to have hours of uninterrupted time so that you can truly make progress on your projects. While I agree that it’s important to limit unnecessary distractions (too much multitasking, checking notifications, etc.), expecting to have a large amount of time set aside for a task amidst a busy life is often unrealistic. In fact, I have also found that during the times I have worked for three-four hours uninterrupted on my days off I tend to lapse into self-destructive tendencies. If it’s a painting I will overwork it, if it is during the recording/mixing process I will get consumed by a tiny detail, and if it is writing I will reword until the work no longer sounds like me. Sometimes these long uninterrupted periods of time do prove fruitful, but more often than not they end in me being unhappier with my project than I was when I began it. Time away from the canvas, microphone, or pen is sometimes just as valuable as the time spent working with it.
So, I painted today…for ten minutes. I didn’t make much progress, but completed more than I would have if I didn’t choose to go for it. I got something else out of it too: this blog post, which is a result of a more positive outlook on my current life situation and the capacity that art exists in it right now.
Cleaning Paintbrushes
I recently sat down to paint after a long while. I realized as soon as I started painting that I’d neglected to do something pretty important the last time I worked – I didn’t clean my brushes. Now, if you know me, you know that this isn’t an uncommon occurrence - I don’t clean them near as often as I ought to. I put it off until I can’t possibly wait any longer, and inevitably have a couple of casualties in the process.
Despite the lengthy existence of this habit, the feeling that I get when I sit down to paint with totally clean brushes is almost enough to convince me that cleaning them more often is worth it. The paint simply glides onto the canvas, and the brushes are well-shaped and exact. In addition to this obvious advantage, I genuinely enjoy cleaning my brushes. It’s calming and it has the potential to help me get out of a creative rut. So why don’t I do it as often as I should? Simple: it feels like a waste of time. I’m not quite sure why though, maybe because I am not actively putting paint on the canvas? In that case, wouldn’t setting up my easel, palette, and canvas all be a waste of time as well? But those are necessary to complete the act of painting…so maybe I think that way because cleaning the brushes comes after the actual painting. Of course, it makes it easier to paint the next time if I clean them, but the time between is so stretching that it seems like a disconnected act. So, I put it off.
I use a lot of brushes and put cleaning them off for a while, so the task takes quite a long time. Sometimes up to a half-hour, never less that fifteen minutes. The paint is hardened and cracked, extremely difficult to get off the brushes, and sometimes I have to soak them overnight to make any progress at all. If I cleaned them after each painting session it would be much easier to clean them, but again, why waste the time? The temporary gain of five more minutes painting seems much more valuable than a later on half hour spent methodically cleaning my brushes, so why question that intuition?
In my room, I have a stack of books that are separated from the rest. They sit sectioned off, waiting to be accepted into the rest of the rankings. The reason that they are separate is because they are a bit different than the others – they’re workbooks.
I’ve had them for about a year now, maybe a bit more. They’re all from my stepmother who is one of my biggest inspirations when it comes to art, life, and love. She has dedicated time to going through all of them methodically, learning more about her craft and herself in the process, and then handed them down to me. I haven’t wanted to get rid of them through multiple purging sessions, moving houses, and even moving across the country - yet I still haven’t made the time to go through them. Why? Well, it feels like a waste.
If I follow the pattern that I have set with my brushes, I’ll wait until my habits and ideas are old and hardened before I work through those books. I’ll probably have to take a few years to break myself down, and maybe more to soak myself in some sort of concentrated treatment to break through the layers that time has compounded onto me. Then I can finally learn a better way to create, live, and love.
But yesterday after I painted, I washed my brushes. Right away. It was as refreshing as I thought it would be, and it gave me hope. Hope that maybe five minutes a day spent on changing my habits isn’t a waste of time, and that change can be incremental. Today I am working through one of those workbooks, and thus I am breaking down a layer of my old self, getting one step closer to finding out who I could be.
Juxtaposition
When I first created my painting “Little Blue House”, it was purely because I liked the way the house was situated in the countryside. All alone and seemingly so important, though I couldn’t figure out why.
Once fully completed, my painting taught me why that little house had caught my eye. It stands out among the countryside, yes, but it also grounds you in the scene. It anchors you to the realization of just how big the mountains are, and the unexpected nature of the house also draws your attention to the beauty that surrounds it.
jux·ta·po·si·tion
/ˌjəkstəpəˈziSHən/
noun
the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect.
"the juxtaposition of these two images"
It was through looking at my own painting that I learned the power of juxtaposition, specifically when it comes to contrasting the large with the small. I started looking through my portfolio to see whether I had used this technique unknowingly in any other past paintings, and I had! In my painting “Thunderhead” I added the people on the beach as the very last step because I felt like the painting was missing something. That small addition (literally) brought the whole painting together and captured the feeling that I experienced while standing on that beach while beholding the approaching storm.
I started thinking about how I could use this technique in future works. I just moved to Arizona rather recently and I want to paint a lot more scenes like the one in “Little Blue House”. I want to capture the feeling of being there and not just the topical beauty of the scenery. The reason that Arizona is so breathtaking is because of the vastness of it – the untamed beauty of untouched land. But when it’s just paint on a canvas, it’s hard to figure out how big and wild it’s supposed to be – because you’re only looking at part of what is a bigger whole. That’s why juxtaposition is so important.
While considering all of this, I realized how often I implement the practice of juxtaposition in my daily life. A hot cup of coffee on a stressful day is something small to focus on that helps calm my mind amid chaos surrounding me. A hike during an emotional crisis forces me to look at the beauty of the wide-open world – the vastness of the sky, the earth, and how much life exists other than myself. It shrinks my problems down to their appropriate size and takes the pressure off. It doesn’t make them go away or solve them, but it gives me a place to put them: among the rest of the world, where they should be.
We get so involved in our own selves that we forget our life is a canvas, and we become stuck - staring at one corner. Take a step back and you’ll see that you’re still a work in progress. Look around, you’re in a studio – among several other unfinished works of art. Take a walk and you’ll find that there are countless other studios full of lives being created, but further still there are galleries of lives that have come before. There is a whole world of art that you will never see if you don’t look beyond your own canvas.
All this consideration of our lives amidst the lives of others recalled something else to me: the common Christian phrase of being “in the world but not of the world” (Stay with me). I looked it up to fully formulate my thoughts on how this relates to what I’ve been writing, but to my surprise that phrase does not explicitly appear in the bible. I found a really good article that explains it well and is totally worth the read: https://medium.com/@aaronmchidester/the-bible-does-not-say-to-be-in-the-world-but-not-of-it-ca582fd0d42c
To make a long (worthwhile) story short, Aaron Chidester does a deep dive into scripture and rephrases the popular saying into something a little more explicit. He explains that Jesus’ disciples weren’t just ‘in the world and not of the world’, they were ‘taken out of, not of, sanctified, and sent into.’
Thankfully, the connection I initially made between my painting and the biblical instruction still stands (I’m very excited about it). Christians are meant to be in the world and are sent into it to exist alongside the evil of it and be a light for God. The evil of the world will be brought to light by our presence if we are walking with the Holy Spirit, and we can be a friend to those who are lost like we were before. We can juxtapose our joy in the eternal with the suffering on earth, especially when we are the ones experiencing the suffering.
Now don’t get it twisted - it’s not about contrasting our own “holy” selves with the other people around us. All that flawed way of thinking accomplishes is instilling in us a false sense of pride and superiority that pushes people away from God – not because that pride represents who God is, but because we who claim to represent God are hurting people with our inflated sense of self. We must remember that without the grace of God and his work in our lives, we were once lost. Yes, we do have to choose God, but we all fall short in this practice sometimes. Additionally, we would not be where we are in our lives or our relationship with God without some kindness bestowed by others. Think about the people who have helped you find God in your life and walked with you through dark times – did you ever feel like they were looking down on you? Did they ever have a holier-than-thou attitude? The answer is probably no – so what do you think you would accomplish by fostering the belief that you are better than those around you?
The first step to being a light for God in this world is humility – because that is what will stand out against a culture of pride. That is what will bring to attention the hidden evil of the world and bring God’s love to people who don’t know him yet. If you feel too small to positively impact the world, zoom in on the canvas of your life, or look around the studio of canvases that surround you. Your life is just as big as the lives around you, and you have the power to bring joy and love to others. If you feel too self-important and can’t seem to get off your high horse long enough to talk to your neighbor, zoom out for a moment and see how small your horse is compared to the mountains that surround you.
Anyways, back to that little blue house - I love it. I love the fact that it somehow adds more beauty to the already gorgeous landscape. I love that in something that looks so small and insignificant from a distance, life is blossoming. I love that whoever lives there decided to paint their house blue.
God Does Not Play Favorites
"God does not play favorites. The more you enlarge your capacity for His presence by becoming excellent at what you do, the more the Father will entrust to you. That's how you grow in the Kingdom."
Matt Tommey (Prophetic Art, pg. 18)
This quote threw me back on my heels this morning. It was exactly what I needed to hear while I sipped my coffee after reading through Flannery O'Connor’s prayer journal entries, thinking how similar the way that she talked to God is to my own communication with him. She lived so long before me, and yet her feelings of why she cannot see God as well as she wants to are exactly my own.
"Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth's shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon...I do not know You God because I am in the way. Please help me push myself aside."
Flannery O’Connor
At the end of the day, each in our respective places in time, we are both young women who are trying to see God behind the shadow of ourselves. And that is truly what is in the way, isn't it? Simply the shadow of ourselves.
I have a recurrent conversation with the same friend that gave me the copy of Flannery O'Connor’s prayer journal about other people and their capacity for depth. Until this morning, I've never quite figured out how to word my thoughts on the issue - or maybe I didn't even fully know what I thought - but these two excerpts combined from Tommey and O'Connor have given me clarity. Specifically, the very to-the-point statement given by Tommey: "God does not play favorites."
There! That's it! That's what I think. We are all born with different gifts and abilities, but none of those make us less or more valuable than our fellow humans. We all have a role to play in the world, and if any of us choose not to fulfill what we are called to then there is a hole that is left by our absence: we are not replaceable because we are all individual. So no, none of us are born the same, and we all have different capacities for earthly achievement, but no person is born with a diminished capacity for seeing God. Because God does not play favorites!
This is directly correlated with our "depth" as people. Because what is depth other than a connection with God? I cannot believe that certain people are born slighted out of the kingdom of God with a lesser capacity to experience him, because that belief cannot coexist with the reality that God desires for all of his creation to know him.
"My dwelling place shall be with them; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people."
Ezekiel 37:27, ESV.
God wants to know us, and for us to know Him, not only after this earthly life, but in the thick of it. He wants us to experience his love and his goodness and share it with those around us. He is a just God. If He were to disenfranchise a portion of his creation in their capacity to know him, it would be in direct opposition to who He is.
Learning to Strum
Up until now, I have never stopped to breathe. I have been always moving – to a different city, onto a new hobby, into a new relationship. I have been desperate – doing anything that I can in order to escape the generational curse that seems to have a hold on my family: stagnation.
Growing up, I watched my family constantly settling for what was rather than striving for what could be. I decided long ago that this would not be my future. I thought I was doing well, honest I did. I flipped my life upside down, moved across the country, and switched career paths all within a matter of two months. How the hell could I be stagnating now?
Then, I realized something. Every time I write a new song on guitar, I strum the same rhythm, over and over again. The melodies are different, the lyrics are different, but that same rhythm keeps on repeating like a funeral rite in every single one of my songs. I wish it was an artistic choice, but the reality is that I never took the time to properly learn how to strum.
I am self-taught when it comes to many things, but especially when it comes to guitar. I have never had a formal lesson and just decided one day that I wanted to learn so that I would have something portable to play while singing, which is my first love. I fumbled my way through some covers and eventually learned to play enough chords to get by with only a little difficulty (and a capo). But I never took the time to sit down and learn anything that would take longer than five minutes for me to comprehend, or more specifically, anything that would take practice. Because practice takes patience, and that is not a skill that I yet possess.
Patience
For me, this is the missing link. I have the passion, I have the talent, I have the drive, and, above all, I have a voracious appetite for collecting hobbies like some collect coins. But the key thing that I am missing is the patience to practice the things that I am trying to learn in order to truly become good at them. I have wanted to master many crafts but feel as if I hit a wall after the initial learning stage. I lose focus and eventually I take on a new hobby to quell the admonishment that my conscience gives me for yet another half-ripened creative venture. I have now discovered that what I have to learn before I can learn anything is patience, because only once I have that will I be able to face the grueling tick of the clock as day in, day out, I have to practice the little things concerning the craft I want to learn. It seems counter-intuitive. I mean, if you are being patient and letting the weeks, months, even years tick on without any presentable accomplishments, isn’t that stagnation?
The Perception of Growth
We have all heard the phrase “peaked in high school” at some point. It’s always used in a negative context, describing someone whose formative years ended up being their glory days. It’s pretty obvious when this is the case because said someone can be found constantly referencing their past and lamenting how things just aren’t the same anymore. But the people who are much harder to spot are those who have plateaued after high school.
I plateaued after high school. The version of myself that was going to community college classes, working at a coffee shop, and going home to “practice” (but never learn) music was the version that I stayed for four years after. Through two different relationships, four different cities, and six different jobs I stayed the same exact person with a slightly different worldview that could only be accredited to lived experience. How in the world did this happen? I changed so many aspects of my life and experienced so many new things, yet my character remained the exact same. My life in each city was a distinct replica of the one in the last, and the two long-term relationships I was in looked so much different but turned out to be the exact same. How could this be? Well, I never took the time to learn why I was choosing the things that I was (and consequently living the way that I was) because I thought that slowing down even for a single second meant wasted time – and would result in stagnation.
In reality, I was stagnating as a consequence of constant motion. I never allowed myself to remain planted in one city, one hobby, or in solitude long enough to grow. I was like a plant that was being constantly uprooted and laid in new soil, never having an opportunity to adapt to my environment or establish myself in my new home.
Growth happens slowly, over time. That is why patience, persistence, and practice are so pivotal when it comes to actually improving any area of life. To an outsider, growth can definitely look like stagnation. That is why sometimes I have felt that I have to remain in constant motion – because I have been viewing myself through the eyes of the people who observe me.
Living For Observation
See, I always thought it was odd that my family tends to stagnate. They are performance driven people who are extraordinarily concerned with what they look like to the outside world. Yet, they are all hell bent on suffering through totally changeable circumstances with gritted teeth, or, like me, they leap uninhibited from one new horizon to the next – the consequence of both reactions being stagnation. I think that both ways of life are rooted in the fear of not being good enough in the eyes of others; if you never try to do something you can never be told that you are bad at it, and if you are constantly moving you can never be told that you aren’t doing enough. Both avenues promise to protect against the unsavory opinions of people around you and ensure that you are safe from embarrassing yourself.
You can provide an additional bastion for your reputation by getting passably good at a myriad of things. If you do this, you can distract from the fact that you haven’t put in a lot of effort into anything – you can skate by, still impressing the majority of people around you.
“Jack of all trades, master of none, but better than a master of one.“
There is validity to this truism, but like all things it should be approached with a balance mindset. It would not do to be an absolutely brilliant mathematician with absolutely no understanding of written language. In fact, the lack of understanding in that completely separate area would inhibit your advancement in mathematics. You would be like a plant that spreads itself too thin across the soil and never roots deep enough to get the minerals that it needs to thrive.
I would argue that a good balanced approach to the application of this common sentiment would be to master a couple of crafts that you are truly passionate about while learning many other skills that are necessary in life (or that capture your attention). This will cause you to look deeply into your motivations and help you learn more about yourself as a person because you will be learning what you truly value. You will also not have much time to be thinking of what others think of you – and thus will prevent you from either trapping yourself in the box of your comfort zone or from continually throwing yourself into perpetual motion. It will also teach patience, prioritization, and persistence – all of which will force you to stay planted in one area long enough to truly grow.
Learning to Strum
On my current mission for personal growth, I am attempting to learn all of these things, but I am also learning other things along the way that I didn’t expect. I am discovering the beauty of the mundane – not only out in the world and in others’ lives but in my own. I’m learning to be patient with myself as I branch out and root deep, finding what is truly valuable to me. I’m trying not to live for the eyes of others anymore, and thus I am beginning to be able to see myself through my own eyes – and learning to trust that my observation of myself alone is proof enough that I exist. I am learning to grow alongside of people rather than just allowing my accomplishments to be witnessed – which involves true vulnerability and deep love. And finally, after years of the same rhythm haunting the strings of my battered guitar, I am learning how to strum.