Better artists than I have experienced periods of low productivity and little inspiration, and better writers than I have put into words both the expression and true anguish engendered by the loss of the creative spark upon which the artist depends. It may be described as writer’s block, loss of vision or clarity, loss of mojo, the blahs, even mental constipation. It doesn’t matter how you express your creativity; whether through poetry or prose, photography, painting, sculpture, interpretive dance or other performing arts, we all go through tough times when life gets in the way of producing art. When your creative output is lower than you’d like, what is the artist to do?
What really stops an artist cold is the individual artist himself. Some people simply suffer from motivation issues, and fail to create or innovate because it takes precious time and energy they have convinced themselves they do not possess. They tell themselves, “Well, I’d love to pick up my paint brushes again, but there just isn’t time!” There is time, of course, but sometimes you have make it. It’s a matter of choosing to set aside the time for art, and let the creative juices flow. If you schedule a time every week when it’s just you, an easel and a palette of oils, when no one is to interrupt you for any reason except a house fire or a sucking chest wound, you’ll find that it’s actually quite relaxing, and makes the rest of your hectic week seem a little bit less so because you know you have this moment of creative solitude to look forward to.
It’s also easy for a new artist to convince himself that it’s all been done before, and unless he creates something truly unique or innovative, it’s all simply derivative at best, and outright plagiarism at worst. This is also a fallacy (except if you’re really plagiarizing something, of course); just because someone has produced something before similar to what you’ve created, it doesn’t diminish the value of what you’ve done. Yes, many painters have done still-life scenes of bowls of fruit in front of a window with morning sunlight streaming in, but not THIS basket of fruit in front of THIS window on THIS day, and unless you’re very skilled and trying very hard to copy another artist, you’re probably not going to paint it in the same way. The jewelry that my wife and I create are fantastic, of course, but because we still choose the materials, the colors and the style in which they are made, they are still uniquely ours even though they may sometimes be similar to the designs of other artists. Other photographers have certainly visited Victoria Falls or gotten good shots of Gentoo penguins in Antarctica, but that doesn’t make mine worse than theirs or less valuable, because maybe I’ve gotten a particular angle or lighting aspect or captured a particular moment in time that is unique in spite of being a familiar subject, and maybe my audience will be seeing this subject for the first time, and so my shot has the greatest impact upon them by virtue of simply being the one they’re looking at right now. Just because someone has already blazed the trail upon which you walk does not make the place less important to visit yourself, and you should certainly not let that stop you from walking the path.
When you hit a wall with your creativity and can’t think of how to get around your mental block or even get started creating, the time you spend on the mechanics and techniques of your craft will pay dividends when it comes time to create. That’s the advice I would give both established artists and beginning ones when faced with a lapse in creativity: just do it. There is a writing exercise that some teachers advise when you have writer’s block to simply start out by writing a page of something, anything, just to get the process going. It doesn’t have to relate to the actual project you want to work on, it will probably be crap, and that’s okay. You’re only doing it to get the creative juices flowing – priming the pump, if you will.
The same goes with any other art form: when you hit a stumbling block in your creative process, the dancer does stretches and forms, the composer plays something else (including other composers’ work), the sculptor makes a crappy ashtray or a vase, and the photographer takes photos of some flowers in his back yard or the fabric patterns of his curtains. None of this is satisfying work of any intrinsic value in and of itself, but often simply going through the motions makes room for inspiration to bloom. Suddenly, in the midst of finding unique angles to photograph a teacup or a handful of flower petals, you might wonder, “Well, what would happen if I did…. this?” Perhaps the sculptor might take the idea of the clay ashtray every kid makes their parents in grade school whether or not the parents actually smoke and build upon that idea to create some expression of innocence lost. There’s a long history of painters who learned the same techniques employed by the masters before them who churned out the same old stuff, until one day someone said, “Well, what if I applied the paint in little dots instead of broad brush strokes? What if I took realistic depictions of mundane objects and made them interesting by employing repetition of form and pattern?” Without even realizing it, you jump start the creative process by simply doing the work, and you’ve created something new.
Will you create a whole new genre or artistic movement? Well, probably not; after all, there is a limited list of artists who have become household names precisely because innovation is hard. Creativity, however, is not limited to just the trailblazers: Picasso was not the only cubist painter, but merely one of the first. Beethoven may have been the first composer to put a choir into a symphony, but that doesn’t mean that Mahler was a poser for liking it and doing the same thing. You can appreciate the work of artists who have come before you and build upon the foundations they have laid by learning from what they have done and continuing along the path they have forged ahead of you.
Is all this a guarantee against mental blocks? No. You may very well hit a period when nothing inspires you and you can’t seem to create anything at all, and that is the time when it’s important to make time to play. Don’t worry about creating anything, just do it because you enjoy it. Start out doing something simple and worthless and mindless. If you’re a sculptor, really do make a small little grade-school quality vase. If you’re a writer, jot down a limerick or three, or just make up a nonsense short story – the sillier, the better. If you’re a photographer, challenge yourself by finding the most boring subject you could possibly photograph, like the contents of your fridge or a pair of shoes, and find as many creative ways to shoot the subject as you can think of. By doing this kind of mechanical work, you focus your mind on the kind of task you’re interested in doing without the pressure of producing something of worth, and it lets you relax into the work. After doing that, you may find it much easier to find interesting things to do when you come upon a more interesting subject.
If that doesn’t work, you can also look to the work of others for inspiration. Photographer Art Wolfe likes to talk about how his study of the great artists informs his own work, because he has a catalog of artistic forms in his mind that he can draw upon in the field. He can look at a landscape and say, “The patterns in the leaves of that stand of trees reminds me of a Pollock painting,” or “The reflection of the wildflowers on the far shore of this pond reminds me of a Degas,” and he is able to find the artistic value in shots that might be overlooked by other photographers. A friend of mine is a writer, and she often reads books from genres having nothing to do with the ones she deals in, but from reading trashy, bodice-ripper checkout-line romances, Louis L’Amour westerns, or epic historical fiction, she gets ideas of where some of her stories might head. I look at the work of other photographers and often think, “I like this, but I think it would be even better if the shot were tighter/wider/less exposed/framed or cropped differently/from a higher angle/warmer/with a different depth of field,” and if I find myself in that exact same spot with the same subject, I can remember that experience and say, “Okay, remember, you thought it would look better THIS way, so let’s try that.”
The creation of art is an active process, so even when you feel you lack inspiration, it’s important to just keep doing it. No one creates only masterpieces: J.S. Bach was arguably one of the greatest composers in history (and certainly one of the most prolific), but some of his stuff is either boring or simply unlistenable. In addition to great and timeless works like Romeo and Juliet and MacBeth, Shakespeare also wrote what have come to be known as the Lesser Plays, not because they’re shorter, but because they’re considered by some to actually be quite bad. If great artists like these occasionally produced turkeys, what makes you think you should be immune to the possibility of failure? And if they can fail at something we all agree they have “mastered,” what’s stopping you from trying to do the best you can? And in the end, the only critic who truly matters is you: if you enjoy doing it, and you like the results of your efforts, who really cares what anybody else thinks of it? If you derive satisfaction from the art you create, that gives the work one form of value that no critic can take away from you.
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