My friend Constance (http://steplikeagiant.wordpress.com/) came to the studio this morning and, as usual, we chatted about a lot of things, art related and otherwise. One thing we talked about was private vs public expression (e.g. paper journaling vs blogging) and also about painting over things that almost seem too personal (or embarrassing?) to share. Self-editing and over analysis can easily become blocks to creativity…..and certainly to authenticity. I know I am not the only one who paints (or writes) things into my work that I end up covering up (or deleting). Write it all, paint it all………..be honest and get it out – there will always be plenty of time to repaint or edit. I’ve been reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, http://www.lewishyde.com/pub/gift.html. After Constance left I picked it up and started a new chapter. Immediately I came upon this quote from Allen Ginsberg:
The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time the most universal….That was something I learned from Kerouac, which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing……that the cure for that is to write things down which you will not publish and you won’t show people. To write secretly….so you can actually be free to say anything you want.
It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless – abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself. You really have to make a resolution just to write for yourself, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your Self is saying.
The late great David Foster Wallace said, “No one who is invested in any kind of art can read The Gift and remain unchanged”. Give yourself a New Year’s gift: read The Gift.
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