Day 42 - 11th Feb

BUBBLE GUM PINK

Thin dark over thicker light
Thin light dragged over dried paint
Thick paint over more thick paint

She paints and paints and paints
Every day.
"You must show up every day,"
Says the way.

The scruffy little path
Made by children
And small flightless birds
Under bracken and tall grasses,
Where they scurry—
You must go slower now
Than molasses.

Then comes a crack
And you are Onassis.
"Thick red paint on bubblegum pink,"
Says the way.

I stand up
In the back of the Cadillac,
Drunk on progress.
Ninety meetings in ninety days—
“You have to show up every day,
Says the way."

“My name is not important,

And I am an artist."
Unmanageable motorcade.

Unruly.
These brushes speak
In loose, fat tongues
And tell the truth so truly.

Niall Campbell

Today, I was looking at some of Caitlin Winner’s glorious paintings and was inspired by her work. She strikes me as someone who has figured out a way to act as a sort of matchmaker—allowing her art to dance with both technology and social media in a way that elevates both the work and the medium itself.

The opening three lines are taken directly from an Instagram post of hers as I was looking through her work. She combines numerous techniques to create large canvases that simultaneously feel like classic photorealistic Renaissance oil paintings while also resembling modern abstract pieces.

Her Instagram account is what I think social media was originally intended for—people documenting components of their authentic and interesting lives and sharing their process with others, as much for personal edification as for societal monetisation.

I have only really started on Instagram a few weeks ago and am struggling to figure out how—if your art is not a physical and visual form—you can leverage social media to share your work without losing your soul or being forced to take selfies with your breakfast. This is my own ignorance, but I always find artists and their work inspiring because Caitlin—like every other artist ever—didn't know what she was going to do until she did it.

So, I think creatives whom I coach (and from that perspective, I am certainly my own client) do well to just focus initially on showing up every day. The cosmic algorithm loves a schedule.

Artists, however, generally don’t. The term ‘artist’ is an incredibly broad church, of course, but I think of true art as being almost like spiritual entrepreneurship. Art itself must be devoid of an agenda, and I am finding that as I discover poetry (42 days ago, I had not published a single line anywhere), you almost have to rid yourself of agenda through the work itself. This can be demoralising but is necessary—like washing out your mind, like an old paintbrush caked in dry paint. I write some things and think of them as turpentine, stripping away layers of old paint in my mind.

Julia Cameron advises people to do the ‘morning pages’—three pages of early-morning stream-of-consciousness writing that is not for public consumption. I simply don’t have that kind of time, and I think a lot of people with young families don’t. Many artists, of course, swear by the morning pages, but I would suggest they compare and contrast ‘morning work.’ Write and ship one song idea in the time it would take to clear your mind of mental detritus via morning pages. Write a poem, an outline for a novella, a speech, put together a moment of choreography, or create a small painting of an inanimate object—almost like a short daily series instead of morning pages.

I would posit—and I know how much this flies in the face of received wisdom—that if those who are in the habit of doing morning pages instead swapped them out for showing up at their actual medium, they would become more prolific, move through the mediocre creations that need to be made, and get out the other side to the good stuff. I would also posit that the benefit of morning pages—as a sort of mental windscreen wiper, clearing accumulated grime—would be absorbed by this process. You can ship work, clear away the detritus, and also get a few reps in.

Also, sometimes artefacts, fragments, and snippets will emerge that are fit for service—a stanza, a chord change, a brushstroke, or a small canvas—that would not exist had you been knee-deep in morning pages.

As always, don’t take my word for it. Compare and contrast. If you are a creative who is in the habit of doing morning pages, swap them out for a month and go straight to your medium instead. Loosen agendas of all types. See what happens.

I find Julia Cameron's approach to creativity very helpful, but if you are a fan of her method, the ground truth of it is to play like a child. Rigid, totalitarian adherence to anything—including morning pages—is repudiated by the inner child. A ‘no days off’ Calvinistic attitude to something does not speak to them. This is the paradox. Show up every day, of course—but some days, showing up may mean skipping class entirely to do something else. Swap out morning pages for daily art—you might expedite your whole process and introduce balance to your craft.

I could be projecting, but the feeling I get from Caitlin’s paintings—and their social media representation—is something quite sustainable. Life, with all its peccadilloes and vicissitudes, being well-lived and spinning around a central axis of family and art. The canvases are filled with light, yet sections of the canvas seem to gorge on darker paint—yet it all retains such balance.

The introduction of balance—often through commitments that take artists away from immersion in their craft—seems to bring balance back to their respective canvases when they return to create. I suppose this is my problem with morning pages. If you aren’t careful, they can become a dogmatic indulgence when what artists need is parsimony. “I have one hour before I pick up the kids. Let’s write the middle eight in that time, and we can work on the outro tomorrow.” From this, form is born.

I love working with painters of any stripe as a coach because this notion of balance, composition, and a gestalt sense of things is so prepotent, so primordial to the way they literally see the world. Talented painters who have gotten out of their own way often produce not only their best work but also live—not, as the rumour goes, as inconsistent prima donnas—but rather as the best emotional version of themselves.

More and more, as I reach the deeper levels of people’s creative blocks, both my clients and I realise that these blocks are very deep indeed, often part of patterns laid down in very early childhood and beyond. This wounding—being sub-verbal—is best dealt with in a similarly non-verbal way. Expressive art, especially large-canvas painting, seems to hold a special capacity to percolate and process things that need never be discussed because they were somewhat formless to begin with. Only colour can talk to it. I am not an art therapist, but I totally accept that art is therapeutic, period.

When I saw the Instagram post containing the first stanza of this poem, it held the sort of linguistic quality for me of Caitlin’s paintings—they stuck in my throat while flying off the tip of my tongue at the same time.

I love how she stacks different images to create "realer than real" portrayals of her family's life, especially of her children. The petits morts—those little deaths of watching children grow—cannot really be captured in one image. A composite of memory is technically how we remember our children anyway, in episodic memory.

Her technique of using Photoshop and other software to create canvases full of families in orientation to one another takes on, for me, a subtle psychedelic feel—that "realer than real" phenomenology of any liminal or non-ordinary state.

I think having an artist's eye is one of the most underrated things you can cultivate to prepare for parenthood—not in a utilitarian way, but in a way that allows you to, at a moment’s notice, disintegrate a scene in front of you.

Artists of deep calibre need to price their work accordingly to allow themselves the time to teach us all to see as they do. This is of inestimable societal value right now.

The path in the poem comes from just such an experience. To walk a path with children is to accept that you will have to go slower and pay much closer attention. As Carl Jung said:

"Modern man can't see God because he doesn't look low enough."

I have been posting an original piece every day since January 1 and so agree with Caitlin:

"You must show up every day."

Sometimes, you go absolutely nowhere. Other times, things speed up. It's stochastic and uncomfortable at times.

So regardless of whether the body feels like it is moving through molasses or careering off after shots have been fired in your heart, just show up and tell the canvas, guitar, blinking cursor, or kiln.

Then tell me by posting about it on social media, so that I may see again, as a child would.