Category: Discussions/Essays

Being True to Yourself

The magnificent genuis of Arthur Rackham, a man who made illustrations into art.

“What you need is to free yourself from your own preconceived ideas about yourself.” — Robert Henri

It’s not easy to be completely honest with oneself. Most of us don’t even try, and those who do, struggle immensely to do so. Why is it so hard to be truly genuine? Well, the harsh reality is that most, if not all of us, have been so deeply conditioned to conform and to fit in, that the entirety of our concious lives has been like living out a program, once set it becomes automatic. Our upbringing, our environment, our genetic make up, each one and in combination make us what we have become. The rest was left to will and chance, and although much of that chance make-up has been fortuitous, other parts of it are not. Those of us lucky enough to have the opportunity to grow up or immigrate to a stable first world country are given opportunities others less fortunate can only dream about. Being given artistic abilities is one of those luxuries but the will to live as an artist depends on you and you alone. If you don’t choose your life, it will be chosen for you.

That said, just because you might be making visual art for a living doesn’t necessarily make you a genuine artist. If your heart is not in it or no longer in it, you’ve stopped being one. You might be officially paid as an artist but if all day long you only think about achievement and reward, then you are only an investor hoping for a greater rate of return on your investment. If you spend most of your time whining, being bitter and judging others, you’re not an artist but only a complainer or a critic.  Real creators are always aligned to a greater purpose; they have little time or energy to be bothered by such nonsense. Because, ultimately, you ARE your actions — all the good fortune and opportunity won’t make a dent if you don’t commit fully to the process. And this is about more than just professionalism, it’s about that passion and love for a craft that once held a place so dear in your heart that you knew that you just had to be an artist. Because to be an artist is a calling, a vocation, AND a privilege. No matter how hard you work, it’s never “just a job.”

Rather than live in material comfort and luxury that his renown success could have easily provided, master artist Alberto Giacometti preferred to live in his studio and have access to his materials in order to create everyday.

Unfortunately, after years of working, it becomes very easy to forget your love of the craft. You begin to lead with your logic and not your spirit. You begin to crave outward success — money, position, popularity — things that actually have nothing to do with the beauty and wonderment of the craft. Each day you work, and eventually, at the end of certain days that work comes to a completion. That’s its due course, but that can not be the only goal, to merely finish the job. The ending of a task serves only to create enough momentum for the next task, the next challenge. The finished work, which is helpful for self-assessment, ultimately becomes a trail of your contributions — every moment of joy and struggle, each individual success and mistake make an imprint and they cumulate to become evidence of the time you’ve spent on this planet. The common things you waste so much time worrying about such as rushing towards deadlines, pleasing your bosses, getting respect from your peers/fans, or just plain old material security, these will all fade in time and be forgotten. The only thing left will be the experience you felt and what you gave. That’s how it is and should be. Hence, to live boldly and generously is the only way to live and create. You cannot rest on past results. If you wish to live life anew each day with the kind of zeal that is invigorating, your focus must be on learning, experimentation and exploration. There will be no room for boredom, nor will there be a dull or meaningless moment. And though it may take every ounce of your energy to live this way — aiming for excellence and striving for quality — you will find the experience worth it.

“Some people study hard for a time, then they ‘graduate’ and sink back into the little that they have learned.” — Robert Henri

Always expressing truth and taking risks, the art of Lucien Freud is evidence of an artist who refused to be confined to his knowledge and formal education.

So do away with comfort. Live free from the known. For what has comfort, security and convenience given us but the excuse to avoid challenge, growth and discovery? Toss away formulas and tricks that stop you from doing anything new, keeping you away from truly creating and robbing you of the chance of having a marvelous time. Remember, both the comparative mind and the mechanical world that surrounds us loves the old ways because established thinking eases the burden of having to pay honest attention to things and to live life afresh.  Tradition always prefers efficiency over innovation. So, to succeed, to learn to live in the now, you will need to make a transformation from the inside out. You’ll need to discard your many conditioned desires and fears and ask what is it that you really want? Who is it that you really are and what it is you are to become? Then you must go out and create yourself. For all art is an invention and the first thing that you must begin to invent is yourself. The process is the product.

“It will take a revolution to do it… but if you can at least to a degree free yourself, take your head off your heart and give the latter a chance, something may come of it. The results may not be what you expect, but they will be like you and will be the best that can come from you.” — Robert Henri

Inertia

The scientific formula for the moment of Inertia.

“If a problem is too complex or overwhelming, then inertia takes over. When we don’t know what to do, we simply take the choice that’s already been made for us.” — Dr.  Jason Fung

I love this quote above by Nephrologist Dr. Jason Fung. Although he’s referring specifically to eating habits and health — he’s a huge proponent of fasting and intermittent fasting — the principles behind it also apply elsewhere. You see, both nature and human nature prefer simplicity over complexity or anything that requires less extraneous effort. It’s why we so easily give in to entropy/resistence or give way to conformity/propaganda. But it’s also a signal that we should’nt be making things too hard for ourselves all of the time. We need breaks in all activities, from eating to making art. We must know that if we complicate things and overload ourselves, our subconcious brains and intuitive bodies will trigger the use of its time and life-saving tactics. More specifically, we must be mindful and have a clear understanding what we are defaulting to when we deal with complexity or excess which is when inertia takes over.

In Dr. Fung’s books, The Obesity Code and The Cancer Code, which take absolutely brilliant new views on the most common and challenging problems in healthcare today, he notes that humans have strayed away from old practices on diet and fasting, traditions both practical and religious practiced all over the world that have benefitted our species. Basically, we eat too much and eat too often and rarely give our bodies a break from consumption. It’s been normalized in our consumer culture to always be feeding the body so that we have energy to do things all of the time. It’s the more is more, the more the better mindset and its egoic overbearing obsession with abundance and security. We think this is normal and right. Unfortunately, the latest science is proving the old traditions correct, namely, that we’re not supposed to be eating all the time. Excess is bad and it needs to be dealt with or else the mind-body’s built-in intelligence will deal with the problem in its own way by compromising the long term for the short term. Often times, non-action (i.e. to stop doing) is the right action to take.

“The best of all medicines is resting and fasting.”

— Benjamin Franklin

Heck, an honest look at our environment already tells us what constant production/consumption (and the resultant waste disposal) has caused to the quality of our air, land and water the world over. We now know that if we eat all the time we’ll keep piling on the weight and bring with it subsequent illness, both physical and psychological. Unless you’re a hardcore professional athlete that burns upwards of 7000-8000 calories a day (or a young child that is growing) you’ll never use up all that glucose. Excess calories is stored as fat no matter what you eat and no matter how much you exercise. To put this into perspective, the average person of average weight burns just 100 calories running one mile and a typical deluxe burger is over 1000 calories. Constant, continual consumption — without longer sustained breaks required to activate fat-burning behaviour — puts the body into an automatic state of producing ever more insulin (which ultimately results in insulin resistance and/or pancreatic failure) and storing even more fat (making one prone to heart failure among other problematic diseases). The default mechanisms at play magnify the problems. Most people don’t realize this, but drugs for dealing with illnesses like diabetes actually causes diabetes. Yes, that’s right, our medications for our problems make the problems worse. But when we stop eating, the body smartly burns up stored fat, ridding itself of excess. It auto corrects if you stop hurting it with excess. Taking a break in consumption is truly good for the body. So too, is taking a consumption/production break from thinking and creative production. Resting allows for recovery and renewal. Emptying the mind clarifies the mind because emptying the cup makes the cup useful. In fact, food fasting also clears up the mind. Anyone who has practiced sustained fasting has experienced this and knows it to be true, even if our modern consumer culture tells us differently, namely that we’ll become dull, tired and weak if we don’t eat. Personally, I do food, work and digital fasts periodically and find it not only harmonizing but also incredibly refreshing.

The goal of fasting is inner unity. — Thomas Merton

Fasting has been practiced all over the world and has been a religious ritual for thousands of years, even when food was scarce. Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Jainism, and Hinduism all have their own fasting traditions.

In the arts, and especially so in entertainment fields like film or animation, working and thinking constantly seems to be demanded of artists non-stop. We work, work, work, thinking/doing all the time, constantly feeding data into our little minds, continually producing something or another. We become wholly obsessed with results and time. Especially time, which is a non-renewable, non-recoverable activity. When this happens, our brains practice the entropic tendency to adopt formulas, habits and rituals to limit the energy required to think about what we’re doing so we can do them more efficiently but ultimately less effectively. Someone who’s flooding his system with food, thus magnifying glucose content in the blood, activates the body’s intelligence and it begins to say, “hey, there’s all this stuff coming it, so there’s either too many goods in transit or we must be preparing for that famine coming in soon, so we better store it for the future. Likewise, when too much is asked of the mind, it also begins to retain its attentive capacity by adopting quick-fixes and it does it so efficiently and instantaneously that we can’t consciously realize what’s happening. It just automatically takes over the driver seat. If the artist is demanded — either by others or by himself — to be “creative all the time” his mind-body also gets smart and goes into auto-pilot mode; he stops honestly observing and loses his ability to pay real attention to the uniqueness of the task at hand. And, as his mind-body refuses to commit any further passion or soulful energy into his work, he stops caring. Soon, when the mechanical process is repeated enough, his vocation becomes “just another job.” He just wants to get it done and over with. He stops making good art. We all know this feeling.

The ever creative writer Neil Gaiman always says “make good art.”

In the world of health and diets, the average American — similar statistics probably bear out in other modern nations — most people eat during most of the day, from 7am to 11pm, a smorgasborg of full-sized meals and sugary snacks, constantly signally the body to pump out more and more insulin to store all this excess consumption of glucose into fat. (Note: more than 50% of the American population is diabetic or pre-diabetic). He never stops eating except in his sleep. Just like the constant eater, the artist who never takes a break from the cycle of constant thinking and doing not only damages the actual joyful and meaningful process of creating, he ultimately hurts his art and his person. He tires more quickly and more often, a symptom known as burnout. Overworking and overthinking, which are heavily linked to anxiety and depression, is probably the psychological problem of the century. I’ve witnessed many artists, who after studying and working so hard and for so long, wishing they could walk away from their profession, or even from their craft entirely. All the joy and passion have been sucked out of them. This is what happens when we don’t take breaks. Overthinking and overworking kills art.

Never forget the power and danger that resides in our default state and inertia. We’ll always naturally defer to practices and techniques that help us resolve short term issues. We’ll eat all the time because it’s what we’ve told to do; it’s popular, convenient and in the immediacy of the moment, also enticingly satisfying. We’re not thinking that that kind of non-thinking, non-designed practice (at least not designed by ourselves) will lead us to ill health or premature death. Artists too, need to pay attention. If we don’t take our breaks — fasting from the high-paced productive lifestyle of the professional artist — we, too, will put much to risk, namely, our creative lives and livelihood.

“Every person needs to take one day away.  A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future.  Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.  Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.  Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.”― Maya Angelou