This morning, I am taking the advice below from Ray Bradbury and simply doing things.I can tell you from my own experience that his words ring true. All too may times I have started a painting based on an idea, some novel concept that was I believed to be well thought out. Those paintings are usually the ones that die on the easel. The best work, the stuff that seems to have its life force, comes outside of thought. So, my thinking goes on a hiatus starting now. Here’s a replay of a post from several years back on the subject.
I came across this quote from famed sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury on a post on the TwistedSifter site that featured quotes on creativity. This struck close to the bone for me as I have proudly not thought for years now. I have long maintained that thinking usually inhibits my work, making it less fluid and rhythmic.
It’s a hard thing to get across because just in the process of doing anything there is a certain amount of thought required, with preliminary ideas and decisions to be made. I think that the lack of thought I am talking about, as I also believe Bradbury refers, is once the process of creating begins. At that point you have to try to free yourself of the conscious and let intuition and reaction take over, those qualities that operate on an instantaneous emotional level.
I can tell instantly when I have let my conscious push its way into my work and have over-thought the whole thing. There’s a clunkiness and dullness in every aspect of it. No flow. No rhythm. No brightness or lightness. Emotionally vacant and awkward. Bradbury’s choice in using the term self-conscious is perfect because I have often been self-conscious in my life and that same uncomfortable awkwardness that comes in those instances translates well to what I see in this over-thought work.
So what’s the answer? How do you let go of thought, to be less self-conscious?
I think Bradbury hits the nail on the head– you must simply do things. This means trusting your subconscious to find a way through, to give the controls over to instinct.
And how do you do that? I can’t speak for others but for myself it’s a matter of staying in my routine. Painting every day even when it feels like a struggle. Loading a brush with paint and making a mark even when I have no idea at hand. Just doing things and not waiting for inspiration.
You don’t wait for inspiration– you create it.
So, stop thinking right now and just start doing things.
Redtree Times 
Chuck Close agrees. I read these words of his every now and then.
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me,
is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.
If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you.
If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work,
something will occur to you and something else will occur to you
and something else that you reject will push you in another direction.
Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive.
You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work,
and I find that’s almost never the case.”
Happy working!
Yes, I have read and shared that advice from Chuck Close a number of times. I try to remember when I feel blocked that the work itself is a generator of inspiration– something that I think is often overlooked.
I like the tag line from the Nike adds: Just do it.