More is More

The last few years have been challenging, and they led to a creativity slump for me. In a different era, I was doing new creative activities every month and blogging about them (2017-2018). But between the pandemic, personal loss and health issues, the drive I usually feel to be creative completely evaporated.

Until last week. I’ve been chatting with coach Anne Brinkman at Better Your Life, who works with people like me who are “scanners” as author Barbara Sher termed them – those with multiple interests who thrive on learning new things. Although I’d been avoiding doing anything beyond work, Anne challenged me to find something to do – just one thing.

As luck would have it, an email hit my inbox from collage artist and educator Randel Plowman, who wrote a book I’d read when I first started experimenting with collage (see posts Enough is Enough, Best Laid Plans and Juxtaposition of Elements). He was teaching a 6-week online class starting in a few days. Even better, it was designed to be a great learning experience for complete beginners through experienced collage makers.

The Collage Workbook, by Randel Plowman

This was just what I needed, and I’d like to share some things I love about the class so far.

First, signing up inspired me to tidy up my art area and get out my glues, brushes and “ephemera” – bits of paper to use in collaging, including magazine pages, old calendars, maps, craft paper, etc. Then, I ordered a few items recommended for collaging that I didn’t have, like a brayer (roller) and other supplies from Dick Blick’s Art Supplies.

Finally, the first class nudged me into simply DOING something.

The fear of making art

Many creative people experience moments of paralysis – facing the blank page, a stage or empty canvas. You doubt your ability, question your ideas – or believe you have none – and freeze. You may overthink everything, so every gesture, note, brushstroke or word seems forced and stilted. In your pursuit of perfection (and its companion, fear of failure), you smother what makes art great.

How do you get around this? As I mentioned in one of my previous blogs, in Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, authors Bayles and Orland tell an illuminating story about conquering perfectionism.

A ceramics teacher divides a class into two groups, saying one group will be graded on the quantity of work produced, the other on quality. The quality group only needed to product one pot – which had to be perfect to get an A. The result was surprising: The quantity group produced the highest quality works, due to their “busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes” – while the quality group fretted so much about perfection that their results were far from good. The conclusion?

Making more art = making better art.

This is similar to the philosophy Randel Plowman used in our first “warm-up” exercise: create five-minute collages. He likened it to musicians warming up by playing scales, which I could appreciate. On 3”x5” cards of 140-pound watercolor paper, we were to set a timer for five minutes per collage. We could use little bags of cut-up ephemera we’d prepped ahead, so the entire exercise was about grabbing paper scraps and gluing them down. We had to move quickly.

Five minutes goes by fast. My first attempts, I only managed to stay somewhere around 8 minutes. It was also hard to stop thinking – my mind naturally looked for patterns in the scraps I’d bagged up earlier, and I struggled with decisions on where to place things. But it was fun – and immensely freeing – to move as quickly as possible, just to get things on the paper.

Another liberating aspect of the exercise was that Plowman showed us how to glue onto the paper without worrying about edges. We could go ahead and glue overlapping papers and let whatever we glued lay beyond the confines of the 3×5 card (which seemed very small!) – and that helped a lot. You trim any excess afterward, though I kind of liked how the works looked with bits of paper hanging off the edges. Here are a couple of my first attempts:

I seem to want to purse themes or common ideas that I spot in the materials, even when working quickly – but that can slow me down as I feel the need to “complete” the image with similar items. Still, staying under 10 minutes felt like an accomplishment!

This next one was a “decollage” exercise, where we had to create layers and then strip some away to expose glimpses of what was underneath:

What’s stopping you?

While you may resist making art for many reasons – limited time, cost of materials, concern you’re “wasting” your efforts just “making stuff” without a grand vision or a guarantee your results will be phenomenal – the truth is, the more you make art (or write, or play music, or whatever), the better you’re likely to become. You’re learning skills, finding out what doesn’t work, and ideally, figuring out your own style and discovering what you’re trying to express.

That’s one reason I love classes. They encourage you to try new things, help you learn techniques you may be unfamiliar with, and inspire you to grow. And they’re fun! The stimulation of doing something new, or something old in a new way, is exciting and enjoyable. I just love the process.

If you feel drawn to try something new but fear jumping into the pool, ask yourself – what’s the worst that could happen? You might think you are “bad at it” or feel self-conscious about your efforts, especially at the beginning. But the beauty of dipping your toe into an online class or any other opportunity where you’re not being graded and you aren’t required to share your work if you don’t want to, is that you can just try it out. See how it feels to stretch yourself, enjoy the sensation of new synapses firing in your brain. And what’s the best that can happen? The more you do, the more you’ll want to do.

What would you like to try?