Toward the end of 2020, I decided to pick up a copy of “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. “The Artist’s Way” is a celebrated book for reason, it is a powerful guide to enhancing your creativity. In many ways, “The Artist’s Way” led directly to me choosing creative as my Feelings Collector feeling for 2021. In brief, “The Artist’s Way” is a twelve-week program designed to help its readers overcome their creative blocks and to learn to self-actualize through creating art. Cameron has an implicit theory of flow that aligns quite well with much of what I read and studied throughout 2020 and I will certainly be expanding on that in the future.
In addition to the weekly chapters—which are crafted just so, to recover, claim, and strengthen artistic sensibility—Cameron’s advice hinges on three core practices: morning pages, artist’s dates, and walks. Morning pages, the most famous of the three, is a daily free-writing exercise: morning pages are to be done within the first forty-five minutes after waking up, are to be done long-hand, and are meant to get you to get in the practice of channeling your ideas into form. There is no right or wrong way to do morning pages, the only objective is to start writing and not stop until three pages have been filled. You can write about your dreams, your wishes, your complaints, your frustrations—really whatever comes to mind. The point is to learn to listen to your inner guide, your intuition, and to notice and reflect on recurring and developing patterns of thought. Ideally, doing morning pages will lead to insights about yourself, your motivations, your fears, and your desires. While what you write in your morning pages can sometimes come to serve as the sparks for new creative endeavors, as often as not, what you write will be vamping, psychobabble, or otherwise be little more than sweeping out mental detritus. This is okay, and part of the process! Doing morning pages has been a transformational practice for countless artists over the decades since Julia first released “The Artist’s Way,” and it certainly has been for me.
It was relatively easy to adopt morning pages as a daily practice; I’ve always been a morning person and a contemplative, so I took to it readily. Getting in the habit of going on artist’s dates, however, was more difficult.
The Artist Date is a once-weekly, festive, solo expedition to explore
something that interests you. The Artist Date need not be overtly
“artistic” — think mischief more than mastery. Artist Dates fire up the
imagination. They spark whimsy. They encourage play. Since art is about the
play of ideas, they feed our creative work by replenishing our inner well
of images and inspiration. When choosing an Artist Date, it is good to ask
yourself, “what sounds fun?” — and then allow yourself to try it. (Julia Cameron)
Part of my resistance to the artist’s dates came from the fact that I was sheltering in place under pandemic conditions and finding it difficult to think of festive expeditions that could be taken while social distancing. I also was quite absorbed with fitting a lot of other things into my schedule and found that the weekly artist’s date was the thing that routinely got bumped to the next week’s agenda.
Recently, however, I’ve been making more of an effort to plan ahead and actually commit to going on my artist’s dates. Two weeks ago, I walked to the Philadelphia Museum of Art on a Friday afternoon and spent some time in the Asian, 19th century American, and Contemporary Art galleries. This was a bit on the nose; artist’s dates need not involve art so directly, but, it sounded fun and I wanted to do it! In any case, that trip helped prime the pump and got the ideas for artist’s dates flowing.
The following week, I decided to make my artist’s date a trip to my favorite second-hand bookstore in the neighborhood: The Last Word Bookshop. They have an excellent and eclectic selection, and I have enjoyed going there over the years. I was on the hunt for books about sculpture, to inspire my evolving practice—but I found myself pulled toward how-to books on sketching and drawing. In the end, I bought a sketch-a-day guide and an exercise book on colored pencils. Both are a bit beyond my skill level still, and also recommend acquiring a much larger range of pencils and tools than I have at my disposal (ink pens, charcoal, grease pens, etc.) but I may invest in a few of these things to try out.
At any rate, I was able to try a couple of the exercises with the pencils and pens that I did have lying around. I stuck with still-lifes of objects in my apartment, but I think my artist’s date for next week might involve taking my sketch paper and pencils “on location” somewhere and try out a few more exercises.
Here’s a selection of some of the sketches I completed in the past week.
