The Beautiful Frustration of Art-Making
I am a blurter. There, I blurted. When I am uncomfortable or trying to create a sharing, all boundaries down type sharing, I blurt. It can run from “How are you?” leading me to give you a blow by blow of my day and possible future, to “I need to figure out why this keeps happening,” which opens the gates to unmetered profundity. I’m not drunk when I do it either. If I drink I tend to go to sleep. Kryptonite for me. It’s why I write, I guess. It gives me free blurting without gutter guards.
I’m not alone in blurting though. When I am teaching art it happens a lot, but not from me - to me. It’s actually a wonderful thing in this context because it opens the door to what art-making is all about for our inner beings. Sure, it opens the conversation up about what is difficult for us as we develop new skills and hit road bumps, but it really exposes what we all do on some level - apologize for who we are.
I think that is what blurting is. It’s “Let me get all this out and said so you’ll see I know what my failings are and how I just balanced that by admitting it.” Sometimes it's “ If I say it first and wrap it up with how I handle it, you’ll see that this is a temporary thing and doesn’t define me.” Sometimes, it is a call for help, “I don’t like that this is hard and everyone gets to see how I feel about it.” I have felt that one a few times myself! It’s one thing to do hard things without an audience, but group hard things can be a buzzkill to say the least!
The only answer I have for this is annoyingly Zen. Whether we’re afraid of making bad art or being seen as lacking (I keep apologizing for my table top being full of the week’s projects as though I will actually stop doing that one day), the first step is taking a long, slow breath and letting it out. This signals to the body that we are stepping back instead of hurtling into a full on blurt. The next thing I do is crack a smile. Not a weird “I’ve got a secret” smile, but a tiny lift of the corners of my mouth. This sends a message to the brain that things are OK… or getting there. It also creates a pause, an all important pause.
The pause lets all the things we really do know about our being just fine the way we are come to the surface; that this is not about perfection and about how dumb it is that people actually judge each other and that we are not someone who plays in that sandbox. The pause relaxes us and gives us the chance to move on to another subject or ask for help without beating up on ourselves in the process. Gotta love a good pause!
A lot of the time, after the pause, I change direction and focus on listening, or wheel back around to what my ACTUAL point was and go there. I stop worrying about my garage disarray and the chair I am painting that sits atop my kitchen table and the fact that I am 62 and haven’t burst through the financial stability bubble yet…yes…all these things connect. Even in art-making, our little frustrations stem from the one or two big ones we shoulder elsewhere. Sometimes I just take a big breath and blurt again!
It is helpful to take that pause and put a little perspective in place, afterall, when I do leave this world I can guarantee you that NOONE will even remember whether there was a chair on my table or dog hair on the floor. Noone will care whether my paintings were perfect or even if I managed to finally find financial security. They’ll remember that I made art despite it all.