I’ve never been to art school. I don’t have an MFA. I’m more or less self-taught. What does that tell you about me and my art?
Pretty much nothing, right?
But there is a good chance your brain made a few associations anyway. It’s okay. We can’t help it. In our culture, self-taught is a tad suspect. We’re very schooly in our assumptions, and we apply a lot of very schooly ideas to pretty much everything.
Especially to our Arful Selves.
Artists who come to their art outside of the academy, who don’t have certificates from art institutes or letters after their name, sometimes find themselves battling not just the vagaries of an artful life but the feeling that their art is somehow less legitimate than that of their lettered colleagues.
We look at glossy art magazines and doubt slips in. We read artist bios at galleries and in the front pages of literary journals, and confidence drains away. We look around at our paints, at the stacks of our homebrew cds, at the copies of our chapbooks, and feel a little foolish.
Maybe even fraudulent.
Definitely small.
Enter That Well-Meaning Voice
At some point what often happens is something like this: the well-meaning voice of assurance in our heads (you do have one of those, don’t you?) swoops in to coo and praise and tell us of course we’re artists. That real artists make art. That there is no other definition that matters.
And maybe we’re reassured, and pick up the pen or the brush and get busy.
But maybe doubt persists.
And maybe it persists because that well-meaning voice has interrupted a dialogue that needs to occur in order for us to understand what it is we’re doing, and why.
Tools and Teachers
One great benefit of attending any kind of art institute or MFA program is that it puts the tools of our craft in our hands and puts us in the company of instructors skilled in the use of those tools. It also provides us with the initial makings of a collegial tribe, a community, a network.
Fortunately for those of us who have pursued an artful life outside of academia, tools and teachers and colleagues are not the sole province of school. Which is good news, because tools and teachers and colleagues are instrumental to the development of an artful life.
Unfortunately, that well-meaning voice of assurance can sometimes short-circuit that development.
Well-Meaning… and a Little Bit Defensive.
In its rush to tell us we’re good enough, that well-meaning voice can interfere with our growth. It can keep us from seeking out instruction from someone whose expertise exceeds our own. It can stop us from reaching out to other artists within our community, lulling us into a sense of self-sufficiency when our art would truly benefit from engagement with other artists.
It can even make us cynical, succumbing to a sort of reverse snobbery that leads us to sneer at any semblance of popular success as selling out.
Clinging to one’s outsider status is every bit as limiting as holding a bias in favor of the institutional stamp of approval.
Artists, Not Islands
To recognize that art comes from within doesn’t mean we’re islands. To understand that all learning is essentially self-teaching doesn’t mean that instructors are of no value.
For those of us working outside academia, where certificates and letters have little to do with our daily work, gaining expertise is a two-part process of showing up and opening up, both to the unique desires of the Artful Heart and to the guidance of the world, in whatever shape that guidance may take.
If you sense that you’re underplaying your part out of some perceived lack of credentials, by all means address that perception. And know that school is just one of many paths. But beware of the cheerleading self-talk that can talk you right out of growth and change. Reaching out for connection, seeking out expertise, these are not signs of lack, but indications of a new and more complex understanding of what it means to be an artist, i.e. one who is artfully engaged with the world.
A novelist Ursula K. LeGuin wrote, “In the dark, under the waters, all islands touched, and were one.”
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An old friend of mine — a minister with one of those wacky alternative churches that dotted the landscape in the New Age era — used to talk about something he called Divine Discontent.
It’s that betwixt-and-between restlessness that comes upon us when we can’t figure out where to go but don’t want to be where we are. Figuratively and otherwise.
I’m into alliteration and I like the phrase. I even liked the church, insofar as it was wacky and creatively engaging and helped me wrap my mind around all kinds of interesting ideas about life and the universe and other important stuff.
But the feeling? It’s wiggly. I don’t much care for it. And for the life of me I’ve yet to understand what’s so divine about feeling like there’s something I need to be doing and not knowing what the hell it is.
A little clarity might help. A little, I don’t know, specificity?
Enough with this fumbling in the dark.
How do you respond to an urge that compels you to move forward while not telling you where, exactly, forward is?
It’s maddening.
Is it urging you toward a new project, or a whole new approach? Is it just the chapter that’s not working, or the whole damn book? Should you revisit the lyric that refuses to settle into its verse, or the whole career?
And how do you know that wiggly feeling is not just a craving for novelty, or a resistance to the untidy middle of whatever trek you’re currently on, the beginning far behind, the end not yet in sight? How do you know it’s not fear disguised as a need for change?
What if you’re right on the verge of a breakthrough, and your timid little reptile lobe — the part of your brain that’s afraid of pretty much everything — is just throwing down one last hissy fit?
In other words, how do we tell the difference between Divine Discontent and fickleness, or fear, or flat out self-sabotage?
Well… maybe we could start by asking it.
Face it, if our heads could figure this one out, they would have done so already. This is not about our heads. It’s about our guts. And that wiggly sense in there that something needs to happen.
So have a little chat with that feeling in your gut. Ask it what it really wants.
And why it wants it.
And then listen very closely to what it says.
And when you do, keep this in mind: Divine Discontent doesn’t come packaged in layers of anxiety. It doesn’t scorn the work your currently doing. It doesn’t trivialize the present in favor of the future, or undermine your passions or make you feel small. It may speak to you of urgency, but it doesn’t rush. It may be critical, but it isn’t disparaging. It may ask you for more, but it doesn’t compare you to others, or get out some yardstick of accomplishment to show you where you’re failing to measure up.
The urging of Divine Discontent speaks to your strengths, which is to say, those things that make you feel strong. That’s because the voice of Divine Discontent is the voice of your Wild Artful Heart, and your Wild Artful Heart is strong and wants you to be strong — needs you to be strong — right along with it.
Periods of restlessness and discomfort and discontent are part of the Adventure. Not the best part, not the most fun, but necessary. We don’t have to like them. We just have to pay attention, and practice a little discernment. Learn when to hold ‘em, and when to fold ‘em. And when to tell that wiggle in your gut to go away and let you get your work done.
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The other day I updated my About page and mentioned that I spent about ten years leading what I called a false life.
Maybe you know what I mean.
It wasn’t an empty life. It wasn’t a worthless or useless life. It was just that what I was doing during those years wasn’t what I came here to do, and I knew it.
That’s what made it false. The knowing.
It’s not like I didn’t have a clue what I came here to do. From an early age I knew with utter conviction that I wanted to be a writer, an artist. I knew that I had a voice, and that I had something to say. But saying it was just too hard for me for an absurdly long time.
So I did something else.
I danced around the edges of my artful self. I painted signs for retailers. I painted pottery in a factory. I played records on the radio and wrote commercial copy. I wrote corporate white papers about things I didn’t care about, didn’t believe in. I accepted awards and paychecks.
I danced until I couldn’t do it any longer.
And then I danced a little more.
I very much believe that nothing is ever really wasted. Squandered, maybe, but not devoid of meaning. And so I can glean bits of truth from those false years. But I don’t pretend my lost decade was something inevitable, a passage I somehow had to make.
It was something I allowed.
During those years, I let fear have its way. Fear of being penniless. Fear of being ridiculed. Fear of being ignored. Fear of being great. Fear of being me.
Maybe you know something about that, too.
But fear gets old.
And time makes you bolder. Or so the song says.
Toward the end of those years — though I didn’t realize at the time that it was the end of anything, or the beginning; that realization came only in retrospect — I began to get glimpses of the life I wanted, seeing it as if through wavy glass, or layers of scrim.
It was like coming out of anesthesia.
I heard the world inviting my artful self to come out and play. It had been inviting me all along, of course. I’d just always said no.
Until one day I said yes.
And curious things started to happen.
I went to work in community radio and regained my true voice. I went to see singer/songwriters and began to make music again. I ventured out to poetry readings, first to listen, then to read at them myself. I bought a sketchbook.
Most of all, I began to pay attention.
And I felt the falseness give way, and something more true rise up, like dormant seeds germinating in newly fertile soil.
It happened so quickly.
It took a painfully long time.
And then one more thing happened.
Somewhere between the community radio and the poetry readings, I became a mother. Yet another veil fell away, along with another myth, the one that says the tethers of domesticity are anathema to creativity. Well, maybe the normal tethers are anathema. But who’s talking about normal?
We’re talking about art. And truth. And waking up from that numbing falseness to discover that art is in the connection, in the immersion, in the deep desire of the wild heart to be in relationship with the world.
Life is always ready.
My life. Your life. Always.
The poet Anais Nin wrote, “The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
For some of us, that day is a long time in coming. Which is all the more reason to embrace it when it finally does arrive.
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