Thank you, Mr. Sendak, for that title. It occurs to me today, while I sit at the table making stuff rather than studying online as I should. I have been reading artist’s blogs, talking to artists, and talking to people who seem to be truly “actualized” in thier creative pursuits. Oh, I will get to the online stuff. But for now, I feel supremely satisfied and fascinated working on my sculpture of a Frog Prince, a better version than the first. Making his expression a bit more pleading. His hands clasped next to his face. His lips more extreme. His fat and skin falling into wrinkles and folds in much more accurate detail… (Don’t ask me how I know). It is good to let go. I want to let go even more, and perhaps make something people can’t even figure out!
One artist whose work I greatly admire stated in a blog that art wants to be made. We don’t dream it up so much as it is already there, depending on us to give it form and voice. Wow. That changes everything for me. By simply letting go and allowing things to happen, things take shape under my hands that I did not even see. One becomes entranced with pushing a paintbrush or clay around, and loses track of time. Things start to happen which feel good and are good. Another artist stated that her goal was to amuse herself, and others are welcome to be amused as well. Yet another person I admire, a writer/musician, told me “I just screw around doing what I truly enjoy, and I get paid for it”. I have spent so many years doing jobs which do not capture my imagination at all, require no creativity, and which I am frankly not very good at because they just bore me to death. I recently took the Myers-Briggs personality test, and discovered that my type is the rarest, at only 1% of the population. It is a relief to know that the reason it often seems as though nobody understands me is that they actually don’t! I wonder if other creative people have a similar type. I have always known that my brain worked a little differently than other people’s, and that made life in the Western World difficult to fit in. Making creatures out of clay or drawing or observing clouds will always be more interesting to me than studying medical terminology, no matter how I try. Working has never had anything to do with enjoyment.
I look forward to taking deeper and deeper cuts with art, leaving the trite and overdone ideas that I feel other people might like, and just letting the art flow through me in whatever form it wants to take. I must work in order to live, and strive to do the best job I can. But my heart lies somewhere else, where the Wild Things Are. Like Max, I want to go there and have a “Wild Rumpus”, though I might never return. I don’t know what direction this will take my art, I suspect it will simply find direction on its own. I like symbols, archetypes, bold colors. None of that insipid stuff for me.
This seems very close to spirituality, this art business. Art, like God, wants to have a relationship with us. It wants to work through us and have a voice through us. Like God, it is a matter of submitting, and letting go, so art can become alive in us and do its work. May both work through me to the limits of my strength, and in you as well if you decide to go there. Amen.
