“Ultimately, martial art means honestly expressing yourself.” — Bruce Lee
Listening to oneself, to one’s inner voice, is a very hard thing to do. In fact, it’s probably the most difficult battle the artist faces everyday — to align both the heart and mind in the same direction.
The goal of the artists is always to find a way to make the most deep and honest expression of his inner self — to allow for that hidden spirit and creative drive to thrust itself forwards and outwards into tangible, physical reality. He has to find his form, then say it in the most direct manner. This is what it means to be a craftsman. Everything he uses is mere resource or methodology, tools and techniques that might help turn vision into reality. He must draw energy from his passions but also be receptive to nature — ever listening, ever attentive — so that creative inspiration might find a welcome landing place in his heart-mind. Once he recieves such a blessing, he must charge forward into action, with all his will and all the discipline that he can muster.
“The artist should have a powerful will. He should be powerfully possessed by one idea. He should be intoxicated with the idea of the thing he wants to express. If his will is not strong he will see all kinds of unessential things”. — Robert Henry
This is the hardest thing for the artist; to find out what he must do, and then go do it. The former can sometimes be more difficult than the latter. But once an idea worth exploring makes itself known — a great story or a magnificent vision of color or form — he must take hard action, and that comes with its own challenges. First he must do the homework by engaging with it directly gathering resources and organizing actions while innovating in all the ways necessary to help that idea blossom into a powerful reality. And in that process, he fights, struggles, falls down and gets back up to fight again. And what is he fighting? He fights resistance and chaos, those entropic forces that will do anything to sabatoge his right to create. He must be tenacious so as to establish and maintain order. He must identify the potentialities and the discrepancies in his work and, like a sculpter, work painstakingly (and sometimes ruthlessly) to discern between the essential and the inessential, discarding any and all redundant or superfluous material that might impede perfect execution so that only his ultimate creation remains. In the biggest picture, the journey of art, like that of life, is reductive rather than additive; he must negate the inessential and turn his focus on what to eliminate more than what to accumulate. He must do this both materially and mentally.
Thus, the true artist primarily focuses on only two things: listening and responding. The collection of his seeing — listening with his eyes and mind — brews inside him, while his passion puts the kind of perfect action into order resulting in a concoction that’s totally new, totally unique and totally fresh. It’s a brew that has been filtered from lavishness or excess, leaving his art with all that it needs, no more no less. LIstening to his heart, he has freed it from any inessential qualities by making hard decisions, not ones logically calculated nor ones hastily made. He’s wary of overthinking as much as overreacting to the whim of his sometimes rattled emotions. Because the artist requires directness and clarity. He knows that if his heart-mind is a mess, his work will reflect that. He knows his final work has no need for fancy fabrications, and this applies as much to his art as much as in his life. He abides by big picture thinking and desires no noise and no unnecessary complexities. Having numerous options brings him no glee. He knows that when he acts and lives simply, he lives free and leads a life towards mastery. He’s not concerned with cunning strategies or “getting ahead.” There’s no fear of missing out. The commonly “respected” preoccupation with possession, position, prestige or even productivity mean nothing to him. Mindful that greed and excess is both insidious and damaging to his creative spirit (and to his being in general), he views such deviations insubstantial and petty. His concerns are set upon living and living creatively. He knows that in the act of creation, he honors his creator. It is a religious act. And in so doing, he is rewarded with immeasurable joy, gratitude and peace. His life serves as a light to himself and to others, seeding growth within he illuminates paths in a world too often filled with the darkness of ignorance and conflict. Ultimately, he knows that to create and live simply is to live boldly and directly, and because such humble and honest expression of the self is actually unselfish, his act of creation becomes the most generous, courageous and refreshing thing he can do.
“Those that much covet are with gain so fond,
For what they have not, that which they possess
They scatter and unloose it from their bond,
And so, by hoping more, they have but less;
Or, gaining more, the profit of excess
Is but to surfeit, and such griefs sustain,
That they prove bankrupt in this poor-rich gain.”
― William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece