Art Club For All: Let it come to you

Making art in any medium is a mind-expanding tool and spiritual exercise of great power for any human being. This is a strong claim that you can test with no more than a pencil and paper. That creative expression should be reserved for the guild of talented experts we call "artists" has dimmed the collective light of our species for too long. It's not about drawing a horse that looks like a horse or composing a symphony, writing a critically acclaimed poem. These exemplars of expertise are truly cultural treasures that inspire, please, and elevate us, but the kind of art-making I'm talking about, the kind that liberates the practitioner's internal and innate human capacity for externalizing our imaginings, is not about the aesthetic quality of the output. It's about trust and flow: trust that creative forces don't depend on having a clear idea of what you want to sculpt, draw, improvise on stage, but will well up from within if you let them. Most people don't know this secret because they've been browbeaten into leaving art for the talented. Most people don't know this secret because they stopped letting it flow some time after they stopped fingerpainting, building sand castles, making up characters, stories, rhymes, or tunes. Fortunately, this learned helplessness is reversible by any with the minimum courage to try. 

99% of the secret is intentionally abandoning caring about the product. Maybe you'll end up with something you want to keep for yourself, repeat, iterate and improve, show to others. But that's definitively not the point. I've written before about my mother, the art teacher, who believed that all humans need and enjoy creative expression but are most often stunted in our creative play by negative criticism of the products of that play. Her pedagogy was simple: she taught permission to play long before she made any suggestions about technique. I can still remember how she got me and many others started playing with lines drawn by our hands and eyes. First, she asked us -- elementary school children -- to cover a piece of 8 X 10 paper with areas of crayon color. It wasn't supposed to look like anything. Just cover the paper with blocks or blobs or strips or geometries of crayon color. There is no right way to do it. Then she asked us to cover all the color with black crayon. Then she gave us toothpicks and showed how a light touch would remove the black layer and reveal the color beneath. 

She played music -- the Moonlight Sonata or Elvis -- and said we could just let our hands go and scribble to the music. She instructed us not to draw something recognizable. She encouraged us to play with lines, rhythms, just letting our hands go and watching the result and feeding back to our hands what we were seeing. From time to time she would suggest things to try, drawing our attention, for example, to the relationship between the shapes that our hands were manifesting and their background. Our brains are powerfully tuned to that eye/mind's-eye/hand feedback loop. Starting to play with it is like priming the pump that brings forth your inner wellsprings of creativity. 

There is art that you conceive and then manifest -- a tune in your head, an image in your mind's eye. And there is art that you discover by improvising, aimlessly exploring possibilities with your instrument, whatever it is. The first kind is about seeing, and the second kind is about looking. My preference is to trust my intuition to manifest something that I can work with. Knowing how to work with one's play is craft. Working at it and playing with it is what the talented, those we designate as painters and musicians, do. They do it because it's pleasurable to play with their medium, but they have also learned about to use the raw material given to them by their less conscious creative wellsprings, to work it. Both letting go to allow the wellsprings to flow and taking something from that flow and perfecting it are crafts. 

Most of my career writing books, teaching college students, lecturing, was about forecasting and raising questions about how technologies such as digital media and online social networks might develop in the future. Much of that forecasting was based on reading, interviewing experts, experimenting. But crafting a plausible narrative about the possible future out of all that rational data involves a kind of intuition. I wrote about the interplay between my intuitive, art-making practice and my technosocial forecasting in my artobiography. 

Try it. Doodle! Noodle! Play around. Practice letting art happen.