Dig!
EPISODE 060: DIG!
Pablo Picasso was once asked whether he knew, when he started it, what a painting was going to look like when it was finished. "No, of course not," he replied. "If I knew, I wouldn't bother doing it." What Picasso was implying was that the act of painting was the way he discovered what the painting itself would become, that putting his brush to the canvas was an act of exploration before it was ever an act of expression. He was also, I think, implying that the act of exploration was the very reason he painted to begin with. And that should give hope to all of us who are intent on making new things but so often have barely an inkling of what that new thing might look like when we start.
Prefer to Listen Elsewhere?
Listen on iTunes | Spotify | Google Play | Stitcher
Do me a favour? Would you take a moment and give this show a rating and review in iTunes.
Want More? A Beautiful Anarchy is published 3 out of 4 weeks. On those fourth weeks you can still get your fix through On The Make, my monthly missive about the creative life. Subscribe now and I’ll make sure you don’t miss a thing, and every month I’ll draw the name of one subscribed listener and send them a signed copy of my book, A Beautiful Anarchy.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Pablo Picasso was once asked whether he knew, when he started it, what a painting was going to look like when it was finished. "No, of course not," he replied. "If I knew, I wouldn't bother doing it." I find it encouraging to hear things like this from someone I would have thought had a clearer view of the final outcome of his work. It makes it easier when I'm 4 lines in on a piece of writing, for example, like I was at the moment I wrote these words, and I've really got only the vaguest idea of where it's going, and no idea at all how it's going to get there.
What Picasso was implying was that the act of painting was the way he discovered what the painting itself would become, that putting his brush to the canvas was an act of exploration before it was ever an act of expression. He was also, I think, implying that the act of exploration was the very reason he painted to begin with. And that should give hope to all of us who are intent on making new things but so often have barely an inkling of what that new thing might look like when we start.
Last month I wrote and published an article about this very thing, though I was speaking specifically to photographers. It occurred to me that while I speak and teach a lot about the importance of creative vision in photography, there might be many who misunderstand this to mean that the so-called 'real' photographers, the ones who've been at this a while, or have achieved some renown, are all out there with a really clear pre-existing idea of what they're trying to make, they press the shutter button and call it a day. I haven't found this to be the case. I've found the creative process much more down to earth, my camera more like a shovel than anything else, digging around in the dirt to find the good stuff.
What's that got to do with art-making? I'm David duChemin and this is DIG!, episode 60 of A Beautiful Anarchy, my podcast about the joys and obstacles of everyday creativity, let's talk about it.
Music / Intro
While many artists make much of their art as an expression of this idea or that feeling, it is usually always first an exploration. Which is an elegant way of saying they were digging around in the particular dirt of their own world with the shovels of their own particular craft, in hopes of finding the treasure that is the idea that one piece of work will be about. And I think it's important, if we're going to use this metaphor, to point out that as all creativity and art happens in the unknown, a long way from certainty, X never marks the spot, and there are no maps.
Every day we grab the tools of our craft, and we dig. Sometimes we spend all day digging, sometimes we hit the lid of the treasure box sooner than we expected, delighted to open the box and find inside something we've never seen, and yet we recognize it as our own. Like we were looking for it, having no idea what it might look like, but knowing we'd recognize it when we saw it. "There you are," we say, as though it were both brand new to us and at the same time so familiar. I think a lot of art-making is the process of looking for something about which the best we can say at this point is, "I'll know it when I see it."
This metaphor of exploration, or even excavation, was at the heart of the article I wrote last month, and I bring it up because the response I got back from that piece was a great big sigh of relief from many of the photographers who follow me, many of them already finding the act of art-making much more like the exploration and discovery I described than the expression of some deeper, pre-existing, vision. And I think it might be helpful to know you're not alone if that's the case with you, too.
Of the thousand replies I received about that article, most of them expressed some version of relief from the pressure they were feeling to have their vision all figured out and only in need of some skillful execution. Many of them admitted to feeling blocked from the creative freedom we most need to make our best work, specifically the freedom to engage in wild-goose chases, to be very speculative in our efforts, to follow a hunch, and maybe most important of all, the freedom from any expectation that we'll get it right on the first try. One shovel of dirt lifted from the first spot we dropped the shovel, and there's the gold. I don't think so.
There are a lot of barriers to a meaningful and productive creative life. The worst of them are the ones that stop us from picking up the tools of our craft and setting out to dig, stopping our process before it even begins. The expectation that we should come up with something great every time we put the shovel in the soil is one of those. So is the fear that we're not doing it right, that the moment we put the shovel into the soil, or the paint brush on the canvas, someone will notice we're doing it wrong. Or differently, which often feels like we're doing it wrong. What if this time I'm discovered, and people find out I'm an imposter? A fraud? Which is absurd when you think about it because there is no right way to dig. There is no pre-established way to look for what has yet to be found. We all look in different ways. In different places. For different things. We all pace the search differently. Some embrace process and ritual, some swear by a certain kind of shovel. Some can only dig in their bunny slippers. Who am I to say you're digging wrong, or in the wrong place?
You know what I love about this metaphor, the idea that creativity can be about exploration and digging around in the dirt for gold we only hope is there? It's damn-near impossible to be precious about it. It's also pretty hard to make excuses. I mean, you're either out there digging dirt, or you aren't. You don't need to fully understand digging before you put the spade into the soil. You don't have to feel particularly inspired, either. You don't need the best shovel, the latest technique, or to be a prodigy, a natural-born digger. You need no previous accolades or certifications. You need a shovel. And you need dirt.
I'm reading a book right now by Richard P Feynman, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, and aside from the fact that so much of it is just way over my head, one of the things I'm loving about the stories of his work, and he was–no question about it–an incredibly creative thinker–I love how he talks about problems. Much of his work, probably all of his work, he saw as a problem to be solved. He started his work acknowledging the specific problem. The problem was his work.
I want to begin my work that way but I usually don't; I begin with this idea that what I make will be golden and I'm always shocked when I run into the inevitable problems. Like the problems are the obstacle, the thing in my way. Feynman didn't work that way. The point of his work was the problem itself, and his work was no less about exploration and discovery than whatever you and I do. It was no less creative. But unlike many of us, he didn't see the problem as the thing in the way of what he was trying to do. It was the thing he was trying to do. He didn't begin with a pre-determined outcome, then deal with the problem, try to clear the obstacle on the way there. He let the problem determine the outcome.
He wasn't afraid to dig. His work was the digging. That was the part he enjoyed, not the inevitable moment he discovered the gold, in his case the solution to the problem.
I think a lot of frustrated artists, makers, and creatives, have forgotten that their job is the digging. Reading books is digging. Research is digging. Sketching is digging. Making prototypes, what you call that part of the process in your field of work - that's digging. Finding problems to solve is digging. So is the effort to solve them. Putting your hands on the clay over and over again, unafraid to try new forms and push them all back into formlessness when they don't work - that's digging. All those shitty first drafts, and the willingness to delete whole paragraphs, whole chapters, that's digging. But waiting around for inspiration? Looking for excuses? That's not digging.
If it doesn't get your hands dirty or take some effort, it's probably not digging. And if you don't like working through the problem as a challenge with its own rewards, you might not love the process of art-making as much as you love the product, and that's a hard place from which to have to pick up the shovel every day. To go back to Richard Feynman: “Physics is like sex," he said, "sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.”
Friends, I know the Muse gets all kinds of praise from the well-heeled, don't get me wrong, she can rock a string of pearls and a little black dress with the best of them when the gallery opens or the new album or book gets released, when that gold is finally shown to the world, but the Muse is as blue-collared as they come. She comes from a working class family and she's more comfortable in a pair of overalls, and would rather be digging for the next thing than celebrating the last one. She's also much more comfortable with us admitting we haven't got the foggiest fucking idea what we're doing, having never dug in this spot before, nor knowing exactly what we're looking for this time– the Muse is much cooler with that than with us feigning expertise at digging, and being more precious about it than it deserves.
I love the idea of creativity as exploration. It frees me on mornings I walk into my office to write or into the streets to photograph, and I haven't got a clue what to write, or what to photograph. It allows me to focus on the digging rather than worrying about the thing to be dug. After all, wasn't that why we got into this in the first place, whatever it is you do? Just for the joy of doing it and seeing where it leads, if anywhere? At the beginning, 35 years ago when I picked up my first real camera, it didn't matter if I had any sense of where it was all going. I just wanted to be out there looking at the world through my viewfinder. Playing in the dirt, seeing what came from it. I just couldn't believe I got to spend my time doing something that gave me such joy.
It's worth noting that we often do not find what we're looking for. Sometimes we come up, not with gold, but more rocks. And the more we dig the more dirt we find. But just as often we come up with something entirely unexpected, something we'd never have found at all had we been looking for it. X-rays were discovered accidentally in 1895 when Wilhelm Roentgen was testing to see if cathode rays could pass through glass. Instead he found a different kind of light, and it could pass, he discovered, through much more than glass. Alexander Fleming was busy digging for something else when he found a mold juice (his words, not mine) that could kill a wide range of bacteria. Penicillin, like X-Rays, is arguably one of the great scientific discoveries of our age, but he didn't go looking for it. He was digging for something else entirely. Pfizer was looking for a treatment for angina when it discovered its little blue pill raised a lot more than just the hopes of heart patients. They were looking for something else entirely, and instead found gold in an industry known for, (cough) its stiff competition.
I guess this is all really just my oblique way of saying: do the work. That's where the gold is. And I don't mean the treasure that turns up from digging, though there are very few feelings in the world like something new and interesting turning up as a result of the work, sometimes it comes and sometimes it doesn't. I mean in the digging itself. The joy that comes just from working the problem, exploring the unknown. Starting out with a shovel, or a camera, a paintbrush or a guitar, and seeing where it all leads. We make creativity so complicated, so over-burdened with expectations. What if it's simpler than all that? What if it's just showing up everyday, and grabbing the shovel, excited just to see what's under there? The most creative people in the world know it's not the shovel, or a clear view of what's to come, but just showing up daily to dig.
Thank you for joining me. If this podcast is new to you, you'll find it takes a short break every 4 weeks when I send out a new issue of On The Make, which is like a written episode of this podcast, sent to your inbox every fourth Sunday morning. If you're not already getting it but you'd like to, just go to StartUglyBook.com , scroll to the bottom, and let me know where to send it. Once a month I'll draw the name of one listener to whom I'll send a signed copy of A Beautiful Anarchy, the book that started all this, as a thanks for listening. Our times together each week are a little one sided, I talk, you listen. If you ever want to change that, you can get me anytime at talkback@aBeautifulAnarchy.com. Thank you again for being here. We'll talk soon. In the mean time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0