THE RIGHT FENCE

Last week, I wrote about abandoning the fences  of mainstream tradition, as creatives that hope to forge their own path of original work.

Albert Szent-Gyorgi:
(Nobel-prize winning biochemist who discovered vitamin C)

And if everybody says that you are wrong, then you are one step ahead. But there is one situation which is better still, when everyone begins to laugh about you, then you know you are two steps ahead.

There's truth to this...so many of the greats dared to jump the fence with their art, changing the world in the process.

Now comes part 2. The point of danger in rejecting some of those "what-is-normal" constraints, is when we don't know when to stop rejecting. We cannot eliminate every kind of constraint. If we do...


the never-ending Daydream

You’re dreaming again. You’ve got ideas! You’re so excited! And your’e finally allowing yourself to dream… it’s your revenge on anyone that ever told you to stop daydreaming & get your head out of your A**. That fence formed of the boards of fear & the nails of conventional wisdom? It's being leaped, no, FLOWN over by your rocket fueled pegasus unicorn of ideas. Up up up, and your head is fully inserted where it turns out the sun does indeed shine (and it's actually really nice here).  And right now, the sky’s the limit. But wait. IS it?

You're drifting into the clouds, thinking how nice everything looks from up here. Everyone looks so tiny down there, running around their mazes, inside their little fences! Ooooh this cloud looks like cotton candy. Gosh the air is nice. No-one telling me what to do. No-one cares what time it is in the clouds! Ideas, I have SO. many. Ideas up here!

But then you realize you're ABOVE the clouds. The sky is a little less blue. You're breaking through the stratosphere and your pace is quickening and then it's black and infinite and there's all these stars and there's comets and ideas too-many-ideas-they won't stop!  and they're too big. There's PLANETS OF IDEAS and there's SPACE DEBRIS AND WE CAN'T STOP DRIFTING AND AGGGHHHH THERE'S A DEADLINE DOWN THERE I NEED TO GET BACK TO BUT THERE'S NO GRAVITY OUT HERE AND I CAN'T STOP FALLING INTO SPACE AND IF I COULD JUST LAND SOMEWHERE I COULD FIGURE OUT HOW TO FINISH THIS ARTICLE AND...

...And nothing actually got done at all. 

Ever felt this way? The high of creating ideas, the crash of unaccomplishment? You need moments to dwell in the clouds, of course- without the space to play, your art dies. But you also need something to keep you tethered back to Earth so that whatever you find up there in the blue skies, you can bring back to the surface to actually create.

What's a good fence?

Assuming we've let go of some of that fear that penned us in before, now comes the even harder task of giving ourselves constraints. Those constraints are a help in disguise. 

What we have to do is to also let go of the misconception that we must wait for the muse to strike.  Steven Pressfield says, "the Muse favors the working stiff." In other words... we don't wait. we work. It's only then that the muse will reveal herself. 

Here's some constraints, the healthy kind, designed to get you working efficiently (but still be outside the box). 

1: Make art in a genre you suck at.

I often call myself a one trick pony; I photograph. It's what I do. But it's always amazing what loosens in me when I get outside my comfort zone and dabble in a craft I don't know well.

Perfectionists, you ready to make something that's definitely going to suck? Of course not, but do it anyway.  What this does is gets us back into a kid mindset. Which we desperately need!

I had a friend who confided to me that she absolutely loves to paint. However, she doesn't. Because she knows she's bad at it (at least up front) and adults don't intentionally do things they're bad it. We're prideful; we don't want anyone to see that we're not great at everything we set out to do. 

When you're a kid, it doesn't even occur to you that your art might suck. My 5 year old doesn't draw bc she's trying to be great, or to get attention or facebook likes... she does it because it's fun. 

make art without expectations.
BRING BACK THE FUN. 

 2: Make art w/ a time limit.

I've seen many artist grow over time by participating in a challenge to do something under a specific time constraint. I learned the value of this after being in a couple of brainstorming sessions with my friend Wade.

 In these sessions, Wade directs everyone to come up with an idea together- a solution to the problem. What we are all used to doing, is then latching on to that first idea and honing, honing, honing it throughout the course of the meeting. Idea #1 takes the whole meeting, because there was no time limit set for how long we could dwell on a single idea. 

Not as these meetings. Wade never gives you more than a few minutes on the first idea. Or the second. Or third. In fact, the amount of time he allows for each idea becomes less with each one proposed. When we've taken a moment to propose the idea and talk through it, just as we're getting excited about it, he tears the notes for that idea off of the legal pad and sets them aside. "Ok. NEXT!" he yells. Slightly frustrated that our idea has just been shot down, we start over. What this does is free us from becoming slaves to our ideas... treating them as precious, as Scott Belsky talks about in his book, "Making Ideas Happen":

“Our ability to extinguish new ideas is critical to productivity and to our capacity to scale existing projects. In a team setting, the skeptics—the ones who always question ideas first rather than falling in love with them—are the white blood cells."

At the end of the meeting? We don't just have one great idea. We have at least 5 great ones, plucked from our list of 10-20 ok (and sometimes terrible) ones that we just created, and we never would have those 5 if we hadn't had the constraint of time to keep us from attaching to the first one. 
 

3: Enter into the constraints of a show or competition.  

 Never asked a coffeeshop to hang your work? Entered a cheap competition? Participated in a 48 hr film festival? You should. The limitations (this is how much space I have to hang in, these are the rules of the contest, etc) will do wonders as far as getting you to think about your work differently, even if you don't expect to win or sell anything.

And... what if you DO win?

4: Make ongoing art in a series w/ a specific constraint

I feel like real, true creativity didn't come out in my career until I participated in an online beard growing competition. For real. There were two limitations; you had to post a picture at least a couple of times a week, and you had to show your beard somewhere in the photo (to prove you hadn't shaved it). Those were the limits set by the contest- then I added another when I decided to include my son in every picture. The competition was 4 months. There are days I was dry and didn't have a great idea, but I took a shot anyway. 

The point wasn't to take one of the best photos I've taken, every single time. The point was to look back 4 months later, and realize that out of the 80 photos I took, 50 of them were pretty damn good and it was a cohesive series that I never would have done w/out the prompting I got from that group. 

My friend Tony took on a similar challenge when he began his #drawingoftheday series. He gives himself around 20 minutes a day to do a drawing in the same sketchpad. Like me, he's had off days and he didn't think he'd keep it going for that long.  Over a year later... he's still going, and our community watches his work continually improve to a beautiful degree.

Now, he has a huge set of simple work to remind him what he's capable of.
 

5: Make art  w/ minimal equipment

Do you know what made Jimmi Hendrix so unique? He was left handed in a world of right handed guitars. That's why he always hit the whammy bar when he played; there WAS no left handed guitar he could use, so he made do (thanks for that trivia, John). The act of learning to play on a guitar his body wasn't made to play- it helped make him one of the best guitarists of all time. How many of us in his situation would have given up on being a guitarist due to the limits of the equipment available?

Create a painting with one brush. Only use natural light on your next shoot (or, if you're a natural light photog, use a light in every shot). Try using the CRAPPY program for your next design project.  I always tell photography students this anyway... if you haven't mastered the cheap equipment you have, what will qualify you to use the expensive equipment you're saving for? One of my influences, "one-light" photography master Zack Arias, tells people to only use one lens for a year. By the time you get the next one, you'll know the first inside and out and you'll be truly ready to expand.

EARN the upgrade.

GO BUILD YOUR FENCE
 

Try any one of these ideas. Report back in the comments. I can't wait to see what you create.

-Mark

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read CREATIVE CONSTRAINTS part 1
check out these books... more often than not, when I wrote a post for artists, its' inspired by them.

War of Art- Steven Pressfield
Making Ideas Happen- Scott Belsky

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Need to talk w/ someone about the struggles of a creative mind? E-mail me at hi@marknphoto.com. I'd love to talk to you.