Come at it from the heart or don't come at it at all
The lips of wisdom are closed to all but the ears of understanding
William Blake, Eve Tempted by the Serpent.
When it concerns art, true art it requires the death of the individual ego and a complete surrendering to the muse and its vision. The process an artist goes through is a continual process of dying, dying into the ordinariness of everyday life. Your ego sheds and dies alittle more each time you realize that the process is coming through you and is not by you. You become more and more transformed into a vessel of the muse.
This is what William Blake and Philip K Dick had in common: they were not merely illustrators or writers of pulp fiction, they surrendered themselves to become the bard for the muse.
Today as artists I feel like this has been lost to us, this is the true great tradition and value of the arts. The thing that we as artists or writers have to uphold in a world that tells us that there is no magic, mystery or imagination in the world, instead we are just cogs in a giant bureaucracy of strip malls that we call the modern world.
This has lead the artist to adopt the language and thinking of marketers and business leaders, even the culture of the modern artist communities you find online is a toxic cesspool of peoples opinions and insecurities that they are ready to throw on you.
If you find yourself in these schools or communities, be warned this could be the death of your creativity because as soon as you begin to imbibe the opinions and biases of others you are now poisoned with their ideas and have to unlearn them to progress.
These ideas and this process is typically invisible to us, we adopt other peoples thinking without hesitation, because we are social animals we become who we are round and this is why so many people are stuck. They live by the expectations and insecurities of others.
It’s necessary then for the artist or writer who really wants to know what is possible for them to at least occasionally live like a monk, to throw away all the advice and opinions of the world and to reinvent the wheel. To start from scratch.
The Seer. An illustration I completed a few months ago when I first started to learn about surrendering, from my own experience. I suddenly had the urge to draw and paint these monk like figures.
More than looking at other comic artists or illustrators in my profession, I feel in my soul a deeper connection to the traditional Japanese craftsmen who built swords and armor for samurai. When you watch these men at work (I’ve included a documentary at the bottom of this article) you can sense through the video the level of equanimity these craftsmen have to their work and I find that inspiring.
Equanimity is another word we have lost the meaning of. What does it mean and how is it relevant to artists? Lets look at the Hindu definition:
In Chapter Two, Verse 48 of the Bhagavad Gita:
Perform your duty equipoised, O Arjuna, abandoning all attachment to success or failure. Such equanimity is called yoga.
We could also say that such equanimity is what we call art. Today as artists we are often more concerned with how we are perceived on our social media than our connection with the muse itself. We want the likes, the accolades, the fame and of course the sales and we want it yesterday. We are attached to our success and failure, this causes massive strife in the artist and where there is strife creativity cannot flourish.
Part of this is understandable, as the modern artist trying to run a business, one has to wear many hats: the business hat and the marketing hat are necessary, but the artist in order to be successful needs to understand when to put down one hat and put on another and to not get them confused. He/she has to know that the connection with the muse is the nexus of their life, without that everything they do will fall flat and fail.
Technology has invaded our minds and integrated itself so much with our day to day that we don’t see how far it has lead us from ourselves and most of us are so addicted to our phones and the noise of the world that we don’t care.
We now have society in our pocket at all times. Society is in our ear constantly, so that even when you are not around other people you are cursed with constantly trying to monitor and manage other people and the way they think about you, “did my work get enough likes?” “why didn’t such and such post do better than the last?”
The Language of the artist
The language of the artist is their intuition and the only way to listen to the intuition is to…actually listen. There is no “How”, no step by step process that someone can hold your hand and walk you through its only from you coming to your own understanding that your mind is being constantly warped and distorted by the noise of the world and this will always make you miserable and lead you further away from yourself.
There is a voice in your head that guides you, most of us just choose to ignore it and drown it out with the noise of the world. We overcomplicate our lives to give ourselves excuses for not doing what the voice calls us to do. Those that seek meaningless pleasures in this world find it difficult to disentangle their minds from the world therefore they do not have the ears of understanding to hear the voice.
How long will you suffer and strife against life until you completely submit yourself to this inner voice and let it guide you? How long will your heart ache from not being heard by the only person who can truly hear it?
One of my daily sketches, 2022.
The irony is that when a artist truly surrenders to their intuition, to this internal voice and gives up trying to make art that is “relevant to the market” or as a parity or competition to the next person, his work takes on a unidentifiable quality it becomes something that can’t be quantified and imitated. Make no mistake all our problems are from thinking we know better than this inner voice.
When we understand this the world seems to almost move out of his/her way and lends a helping hand, what seemed a obstacle becomes a new opportunity, the right information will come to you at just the right time or a chance encounter will bring you the break you are looking for. This life is an act of surrender, to understand this in your own experience is to live without strife or suffering.
“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.”-Leonardo da Vinci
Each Wednesday I post my thoughts and musings on the process of art, please consider subscribing to see more. Thank you for your time and I hope this was useful.