When Your Inner Artist Checks into the Witness Protection Program

I have always said that every artist fulfills two roles- witness and creator.

To form art of any kind, you first have to be a witness. You need to observe.

And quite frankly, in this regard, your inner artist may not be the best at self-restraint. I forget sometimes that my inner artist is always “on” in response to possible material from which to create.

The past week has found my inner artist playing with the following ideas:

The strange happening of physician’s providing running commentary during pelvic exams; how difficult holidays can be for children of divorce; does God want me to change; that my husband, who seldom talks, becomes a veritable Chatty Kathy when we are in the hot tub together, and so on and so on.

Some think art derives from a linear process. I am here say otherwise. It’s scattershot at best.

Once something is witnessed by the inner artist, the event can be transformed by the creator. There is substantial power in this act- transforming events, ideas, perceptions, and I think as artists we take great joy in this aspect. To be able to transform something and make it yours is a heady power trip.

But lately, I have found my inner artist has checked itself into the Witness Protection Program. As this past week shows, it is MORE than happy to witness, but it would rather not come out and create.

When I think to my inner artist, “Hey, want to make some art?”

I am met with a rather blase- “No more. I want to be left alone.”

There is a part of me that wants to dig into this hesitancy. I want to question- am I tired? do I feel too off-center to create? Am I bored? What is going on?

And my inner artist, ever the observer, simply says, “You think too much. I just want to take a break.”

Stuck in the Creative Rut

If you are a creative person, given enough time, you will most likely hit a creative rut. You will find yourself asking, “Haven’t I done this before?” “Hasn’t someone, somewhere done exactly what I am doing?” “What is it exactly that I am doing?”
I don’t care if your creative work is writing one blog a month, every creative individual must confront the patterns that create the rut in the first place.

“Pattern Changer”
A mind like mine
Blind Wanderer on the well-worn track

Pattern discovery a soothing activity
inclusive of no one but me.

I escape into answers
Questions exist, widely open
Too expansive for contemplation

Serenity in knowing
Becomes the knot and the bind.

The poem speaks to my process as an artist and how it leads to my being stuck in a creative rut. I keep looking at the same things in my life, seeing the same patterns. I tell myself answers, when questions would better serve my purpose. If I am going to create, I can not remain stuck in my same patterns of answers and knowing. This process leads to complacency and also a sense of being “bound” into what I have thought before.

I recently read Twyla Tharp’s book on creativity and one of her suggestions to getting out of a creative rut is to simply change your pattern of doing things. If you normally write in the morning, write in the afternoon or night. Take a different route to work. Speak to different colleagues than you normally would. If you check out certain web-sites for your news everyday, try some different ones. If you work out in the evening, switch it up. Work out in the morning. Go for a walk or a run rather than the gym. Take a new class. Change your pattern. Change your emotional response- laugh rather than get angry, get angry rather than standing around complacent. In a nutshell, the best way to move out of a creative rut is to turn up new soil, dig a little deeper, dig somewhere new. Feel alive, again, because creativity results from mining the living materials of our lives, not the recycled, re-used, and rehashed material.