I never signed my work in high school at Bonita Vista in San Diego. I refused to do so even when my art teachers, Mona Trunkfield and Fred James (my best art teachers forever), repeatedly told me. I maintained that my work had not yet arrived – I was still experimenting, still honing the craft. One day after school, they sat me down and gave me my first talk about valuing my work. They told me that even though I was a student, I had no right to judge that my work was not valuable enough to sign my name and claim it as my own. They taught me that our creativity is not ours to judge. All art belongs to humanity collectively. What seems to me like a failed work may profoundly affect someone else.
Later, a beloved life drawing teacher had the same talk with me. I was using newsprint to draw on. It is not archival, but it is cheap. He urged me to treat my drawings as belonging to the future and use archival materials. This lesson continued when I was old to buy artist-grade paints, student-grade may be cheaper, but quality paints last longer and work better.
Although seemingly specific and practical, these teachings are metaphors for valuing our work.
This is the spirituality of creativity. It does not belong to us. We don’t own it and don’t have the right to judge our work’s value.
Matthew Fox says, “When we consider creativity, we are considering the most elemental and innermost and deeply spiritual aspects of our beings. … That which is inborn in us constitutes our most intimate moments…To speak of creativity is to speak of profound intimacy. It is also to speak of our connecting with the Divine in us and of our bringing the Divine back to the community. … The artist in us and among us shares intimacy and return’s one’s intimacy to the world, nourishing the community with one’s own inner experience.”1
This is not to say that I don’t discern what is worth keeping. When I create a work I’m dubious about; I still keep it for several months. If it doesn’t stand the test of time, I recycle it. It’s surprising how this works.
When I first started painting at the tutelage of Michael Chesley Johnson,2 I left my paintings in his studio on Campobello Island. I thought they were awful and not worth keeping. Michael recently found one of them and sent me a photo of it. Although it’s not where I’ve taken my work over a decade later, it’s not so bad. I’ve made it the feature photo of this blog post. When we are in the midst of creating something, our preconceived ideas of what it should look like can cloud our judgment. Letting time pass can erase those preconceptions and help us see the value of our effort at the time.
When I paint a new painting, I will immediately see all its flaws. I prop it up in the living room window and look at it again the following day. Most always, it looks a lot better!
Do you value your work? What practices have you adopted that let you see the truth of what you’ve created over time?
1 Matthew Fox. Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet, Tarcher/Putnam Books, 2002. pgs 2-3
2 Do you want to learn to paint in oil or pastel? I highly recommend Michael Chesley Johnson. He is a great painter and a effective teacher. Go to https://www.mchesleyjohnson.com/ to learn about his books, workshops and see his incredibly beautiful work.
