Maybe the first thing I’ll say is, you know, this facing the unknown, the womb of potential, the creative void—these are all different ways we can talk about the space we’re crossing when we’re going from what we already know into somehow ways of being, seeing, feeling, and doing that we haven’t already experienced. That, for me, is part and parcel of the creative process. And this same exploration, I feel, is 100% central to insight meditation. Liberation-oriented meditative practice, in some key ways, can be seen as the art of going beyond the known. So some of the images or metaphors I just tossed out might sound good to you; some sound bad, some sound inviting, and some sound daunting. We’ll have our own kind of relationship to the idea of the unknown. Sometimes it’s easy to step into that creative void, and sometimes we feel blocked at the entrance. Like any art, the art of facing the unknown can be learned once we have a sense of our own process around that.
For me, this point, this relationship to the unknown, is where one of the key connections between art practice and spiritual practice lies. If we look at the mystical traditions, the meditative traditions within a given religion, one thing they have in common is somehow describing where we’re stuck and how we sense ourselves as limited. The practices are different, look differently, and work differently within different traditions. But they all must have at least one aspect in common – they must help us navigate the void of the unknown, moving from the known into what has yet to be known, seen, or felt. Spiritual practices, meditative practices, and, I would argue, creativity practice somehow involve crossing from what is already known to what has yet to be known or expressed.
This is a quote from E.E. Cummings, who is a Zen practitioner and a poet, talking about art and what’s important. The quote is “Nothing measurable can be alive; nothing which is not alive can be art; nothing which cannot be art is true: and everything untrue doesn’t matter a very good God damn…” So to me, that’s really speaking to the possibility that we are trying to move beyond the already-known. If we can measure and compare something, it’s recognized or known through what has come before. That’s not what we’re doing when we’re making art or being creative. We are trying to engender a relationship with what has yet to be seen, sensed, or known. We are trying to transcend or escape the place where things are known only through a kind of dead, backward-looking evaluation. We want to be moving towards a kind of aliveness that can only come from spontaneous engagement.
So to create, to make art, we’ve got to be cool with moving beyond what we’re already good at, what we already know, and what we already do. We have to learn to navigate that movement beyond, and we have to find a way to do that in an ongoing fashion.
I’ll just share a little bit from the arc of my own creative life and process in terms of this relationship to the unknown. I’ll be talking just about my painting process. I started drawing and painting as a kid, as we all did. I continued into high school. I was pretty good at it. I was good at it and that helped me find something positive and authentic about me to be identified with. “Oh, that’s Susy; she’s the artist”. Even maybe more touching to me when I reflect back on it, art making was also a place and a space I could go that was a kind of refuge. That aspect of it, to me, very much felt like the kind of spiritual root of my creative practice. I would just go into our garage after school, before my parents would come home, and I would put on whatever music I was into, and I would explore.
And the space that opened there for me, in contrast to all of the pressures and demands of being a teenager and becoming adult, was really important to me. Then I decided to go to art school, a very high-pressure art school. The primary goal of the school, it felt to me, was to prepare you to be gallery artists in New York. Never mind that only a handful of people there would achieve that—it was most people’s goal, it seemed to me. There was not much (if any) discussion about having a personally satisfying creative process.
Things really closed down for me in that space. I was not ready for it. I was very young. The refuge sense of painting for me closed up very soon upon my arrival at art school. If you’re familiar with those kinds of programs, there’s a lot of formal, public critique of student’s work. That’s a huge part of what the program is. They have these big weekly critiques of your work. Nothing was about process; it was all about product in a way that I found very harsh. If your painting failed that week, you were a failure that week.
Where I felt the closing down most acutely and painfully was something about this “facing the blank canvas” stage. Like, what is the next thing I’m going to make? What is it going to be? How can it be good enough and important enough to protect me in these critiques? How can it be good enough to justify my presence?
So I would have this kind of nearly pathological avoidance begin to rise up towards the end of a painting because I didn’t want it have to face the blank canvas. I didn’t want to have to start something new because that new thing had to be better, more important, more profound, more meaningful, and more likely to guarantee success for me in my future career. All the pressure was kind of stacked up, weighing on this one point in the creative process.
Whether or not a full-on block arises in relation to the unknown, most of us have experienced some forms of avoidance around creating and starting new things. Where we feel disenfranchised from creating, even though we know on many levels it brings us real beauty, dimensionality, meaning… all these wonderful things. We set aside some time, a morning, to create… but we never actually sit down to work. So part of the process of softening, opening, and enjoying our creative process is most likely, in part, going to involve finding a way to come into a better relationship with the unknown. Maybe it’s more correct to say to open a range of varied and skillful ways to relate to the unknown. It can feel very easy to blame ourselves for the ways in which our creative process closes… but wonderfully and suprisingly, it’s most often simply a matter of figuring out or learning the right tools in a supportive context. The beauty, surprise, and mystery is already there, always waiting… it’s a matter of learning how to stop covering it over.