"May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children."
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
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| Elf Lego mini figure and polymer clay hand 10-25-14 |
"Captivity ends when creativity begins."
There are days when I find myself thinking hard about what my "good thing" is going to be, and worrying that I won't be able to think of anything good at all.
If I've learned nothing else in my creative pursuits, I've learned that the less I think and the less I try to force something to happen, the better off I am.
In sports psychology they refer to over-thinking as "paralysis by analysis."
I know that if I try too hard to control an artistic outcome, it'll be doomed to failure, or at best, mediocrity.
Spontaneity and openness and receptivity are the keys that unlock creative "flow." If I just let what comes come, and then go with it, the results are almost always better than anything I could have plotted or planned.
Today's picture, for example.
Yesterday. Four thirty p.m.
I have no idea what my "good thing" is going to be for the day.
I keep a little lump of polymer clay on the ledge of my kitchen bay window, so while I was thinking, I picked it up and began kneading and pinching and shaping it into a little tree.
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| Jessica Lange in King Kong (1976) |
Leo's girlfriend, Mackenna, said "That looks like a hand."
She was right.
And so I tried working the tree into a hand. It didn't work, so I smushed it all back into a lump and started over, intentionally making a hand and fingers and knuckles and nails.
It was a perfectly fine little hand. But it needed something.
I also keep several Lego mini figures in the kitchen window at any given time -- currently Marge Simpson, Abe Lincoln and a very happy little gap-toothed green elf.
I pulled off the elf's arms and legs, then wrapped his dismembered remains in the clay hand. He looked a little like Jessica Lange gripped in King Kong's fist, but with a more elfin sexuality.
I stuck a chopstick through the clay wrist to give it turgor, making it into a little stick puppet. Then we took it out onto the patio and Mackenna held the elf-in-hand over a little puddle of green "pee" while I shot pictures.
During our photo shoot, Mackenna said something like, "I love how this just totally went from a lump of clay to this."
And I said something like, "It's always good when art just happens."
Voila. I had my "good thing."
I'm making no pretense that our spontaneous collaboration is high art, or even good art, but I do think it is a good illustration for the point I'm trying to make.
Sometimes it's good to just go with the flow.
