Love is hard.
I’ll just come out and say it: I’ve been blocked. I've been working on a painting series, one deeply personal and sometimes difficult to immerse myself in, on and off for years now. I'm almost done.
Except, I have three pieces, no four, left to complete. They've all been started, but they sit there staring at me, in the corner of my studio. (Also, hi, hello, I have a studio, this studio I've always longed for! For years I dreamt of a white-walled high-ceiling “room where anything is possible” to create in. And here I am now, in the dream.)
I've been reading a book, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and the first part of it is all about Resistance. I've worked with Resistance, my blocks, so many times in so many ways (I’ve written morning pages most every day since 2018, completed both The Artist Way and the 100 Days Project, three times apiece, read more books on creative process than I care to admit).
One thing Pressfield identifies is the closer a body of work is to our hearts, the more we really love it and need it, the more resistance we'll likely experience. Similarly, he says that the closer we get to completion, the more resistance rears its powerful head. And of course, resistance is just fear, cloaked in excuses.
Right now, combatting blocks, it’s as if I’m in perpetual conflict with my creative practice. And what I know about conflicts from my relationships is this: they take energy. They’re not free, and while they help us deepen our connections, help us know each other more intimately, conflict is also an expensive state that can’t be sustained.
Conflict demands resolution—clearing out, getting back to center, re-entering connection.
So the question becomes: How to stay through to resolution while also drawing in resource? How to drink in support so you may stay open and curious in the face of the emotions and wounds being revealed?
Recently I've been countering resistance with micro movements. With a to-do list full of the tiniest possible tasks—first, clean out the painting tray, flip over the big canvas whose back I need to staple under, bring out the small piece that's halfway done and look at it for ten minutes. And this listing of the tiniest possible next physical actions, it's working.
I find myself drawn, inexplicably, to complete these tiny actions once I've written them down (that's how I'm here, writing this post, because this morning I wrote on my to do list, set timer for seven minutes and free write on a topic of my choosing, and here I am ten minutes in, still writing.) They feel possible, in a way that ambitions like “write a newsletter” or “finish the painting” don’t.
Another tactic I've been using, to lower the stakes and focus on nourishment, is framing my work as creative play. I've been calling it art therapy. A mindset shift to view my own practice as an exploration. A place to roll around in the void and my feelings and whatever else is surfacing. To treat my own practice as principally for me and my wellness. To allow the outcomes to be whatever they are (or aren’t) and honor the process of showing up to my studio or the page as sacred.
As I’ve continued to percolate on what goals for 2024 might feel right for me (see my last newsletter, when I swore off goal setting at the turning of the year), a question that’s buzzed in the background is: How can I fall back in love with artmaking?
If I achieve anything at all in my creative practice this year, that’s what I want to accomplish.
A focus on how the pen feels, gliding across the surface of the notebook while the timer is running and I’m free writing. The way the edits seem to whisper themselves to me from the ether when I sit down to finesse a draft. How longing for a particular color overtakes me until I mix the exact shade. The freedom in letting my intuition guide how I draw a line or the dark pleasure in seeing the tension trapped in my body pour out onto a canvas in the form of scribbles, scratches, blue-black blotches of acrylic.
I’ve started to wonder—when I am running from my creative practice, am I actually running from myself? From my emotions, my calling, from the deep urges to express and create and connect.
When I am afraid of and in conflict with my creative practice—when I can’t quite convince myself to sit down at the page or go upstairs and open a tube of paint—what parts of me am I wanting to avoid?
I guess as I set this goal of falling in love with my creative practice this year, what I’m really saying is that I want to fall in love with me, my self, in all of my messy fullness.
And it’s as simple and as difficult as that, isn’t it?
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Where have you been feeling stuck? What helps you support yourself as you move through it?