Abstract
This paper explores many process that I have been exploring as a person, an artist, and an expressive therapist. The paper begins with an artist’s statement. The rest of the paper is divided by topics that have presented themselves explores the way that each relates to identity as person, artist, and/or therapist. The overall theme explored can be framed by Nachmanovitch’s (1990) chapter entitled “Inspiration and Time’s Flow” which focuses on some fundamental aspects of creativity. It explores the fleeting and natural qualities of creativity as well as the challenge to open up and allow creativity to happen. At the end of the paper are visual artworks referenced in the body of the paper as well as additional examples of artwork I have created.Keywords: creativity, inspiration, expressive therapy, artist, identity
Artist’s Statement
You know that moment when you let go? That moment when you trust. That moment when you take action. It is that moment that slips away before you know it happened because you did not need to know that it was there. It was that moment when everything just was.
If I was an artist I would take those moments and string them like beads on a thin piece of thread. But I should not dare tie a knot at the end of that string, for that would change everything. These moments would be trapped, defined, explained, exploited--no, let them fall as I continue to add more. For when I try to hold on and make moments permanent, all I do is take their beautiful essence from them that makes them so real.
Perhaps I am an artist, or perhaps I was. I do know that I create, I experience, and I grow. Yes, I am an artist. I am an artist who was on a path with a goal, a path with a purpose. This purpose was to find the way to dazzle everyone, to become the unique and innovative artist that I surely could be. But one day, I stripped off my clothes, tossed away my shoes and I began running through the untamed forest, heading towards that other path I had heard about, that path where you just let go and play! I started off slow and confused. Climbing through the rocks and trees, my feet have not been prepared for this terrain. Sometimes I think about turning back and sometimes I dash through this forest like it is what I was born to do. It can be invigorating.
Sometimes I feel that I am close to the new path, but sometimes I wonder if I have actually moved closer to the old one. In fact, I am now questioning if this difficult terrain toward the new path actually is the path. I suspect that it is, and I suspect that I have chosen a path with no end. So as I find my way, and as I try to commit to this new direction, I make things. Sometimes these are visual artworks, sometimes they are dances, sometimes they are flowing of words into poems or stories, but most of the time they do not like to be defined or categorized. But they do love to have a witness, as do I. So I cannot tell you what to expect and I cannot summarize, because the whole point is to, well, not to do that...
The Past
My background as an artist entails a higher emphasis on technique than I think was healthy for me. I do not blame this on any one atmosphere. I think that my entire life presented environments where it appeared beneficial for me to create art for the attention and the praise that it gave me. Even up to undergraduate school, I still worked for this feedback that I had always received in my life. With art-making I had a way to be noticed and a way to feel significant and special.
The atmosphere of my undergraduate school would probably be considered more geared toward honest expression than most, but for me personally, just being there fed my habit of seeing art in the way that I always had. I was focusing much more on skillful technique and talent as motivations than I even realised. I thought that I was being true to what Nachmanovitch (1990) says in his chapter entitled, “Inspiration and Time’s Flow,” that “to do anything artistically you have to acquire technique, but you create through your technique and not with it.” (p. 21) I did not realise until now reflecting that I was putting much more emphasis on technique that I now wish to bring to my creative work. And because of this, now that I wish to let go of technique and many other things that I used to be focusing on, creating through my technique along with the other learned motivations has proven to feel like swimming upstream at times.
Precious and Ephemeral, Hoarded and Preserved
Now I am aiming to be much more focused on the moment, on honest expression, and on trusting that if I just do, then whatever needs to come out and be explored will present itself. Artwork I make, whether it be visual, movement, or any other form, has a very immediate purpose and speaks to how I feel at that very moment. Instead of creating something with the intention to show it and portray a message or get awestruck feedback, I do it for myself in that instance. I am still unsure about my connection to these pieces after they are completed though. This is mostly only an issue for artwork and writing, because any other form is usually more performance based and if it is not recorded then there is not much I can do to save it. There are some pieces of work that do speak to me in a more long term way, it is much less often than in the past, but when pieces do that, I hang them in my room. I find that this is often when they represent something that I desire or something that I am working to achieve. Then there are the pieces that are important to me but they are tucked away because they represent some pain or difficulty that I feel the need to hold onto but not to display for myself to see on a daily basis. Everything else, I have just kept so far until I decide where I stand in terms of keeping things, and with a curiosity of whether these pieces may mean something to me later.
Nachmanovitch (1990) says that, “Every moment is precious, precisely because it is ephemeral and cannot be duplicated, retrieved, or captured. We think of precious things as those to be hoarded and preserved.” (p. 24) I think this speaks to my desire to let work go as well as my desire to preserve it. By preserving it, I feel that I give more meaning and importance to it. But then it reminds me of my past work with gallery showings of artwork. My turn off to the gallery preparation and the showing of that art as well as the sales side was always so strong. I loved to share and to inspire deep thought and conversation but I felt like there was something very forced and unnatural about how everything had to be so clean and precise.
At the same time, though, for some people, displaying and honoring their work is more meaningful. I imagine that as an expressive therapist I will have to take into consideration whether the person I am working with would benefit more from an attitude of letting go of what they have created in the moment and moving on. Or would they benefit from seeing the work that they created and reflecting upon it. Is there something in their life that would benefit from honoring their artwork and proudly sharing it? In fact, I am beginning to realise that there is something missing out of my life now that I attempting to completely remove this part. I am jumping to the other side of the spectrum to try to figure things out for myself but in the meantime I am losing a real defining and meaning making aspect of my life. I realise that in the past I gained a lot of confidence from showing my art and getting feedback. What I have still to figure out is if I miss this part for healthy reasons, and if so, which parts of it to bring back, and how to know when I am ready for that.
The Stage on Which the Expressive Therapist Must Perform
Knill, Barba, and Fuchs (2004) state that, “Art in its purest form is primarily a ritual activity that is practiced in an elaborate manner only by humans and has no evident “goal” other than celebrating creativity and human potential.” (p. 23) I believe that in our culture, generally this is not true. I feel that we are taught that art (any medium) is only truly justified and meaningful if it does give a direct result, usually money. Sometimes it is for fame, but even that usually boils down to money. This is the stage that is set for us as expressive therapists (at least working in the United States) as we try to guide others to learn, explore, and express themselves through the arts. As expressive therapists, we have to work with each client, with each environment and work back toward that idea that there does not have to be a measurable or monetary goal to art-making. I believe that we not only need to present art-making as a way to celebrate creativity and human potential, but also as a way to learn and to grow. It is quite a lofty goal and works against some very fundamental ideas that are taught socially in our culture.
Balancing Act
This brings me to another challenge that I am facing while learning to become an expressive therapist. Setting the artistic part aside for a moment and there is the professional identity that I am working toward. It is something that I deal with when I find myself defining expressive therapy to just about anyone I meet outside of the field. It also comes when I am learning in school. When I am presented with new ideas and I participate in classes which can each have their very own specific style. I feel stuck between remaining open and constantly needing to reflect and state my opinions and ideas about what it means to be an expressive therapist. I feel that I need to have confidence to take risks and to begin to figure out how I define myself as an expressive therapist at the very same time that I would like to simply sit back and listen, watch, and read until I have gotten a better grasp upon what everyone else is thinking and doing. This is why a statement by Nachmanovitch (1990) stood out for me so strongly. He speaks of creativity and says that it requires “a delicate balance of sticking to your guns and remaining open to change.” (p. 22-23) It goes to show that not only the content of our work involves creativity but the collective existence of our profession requires an attitude of creativity.
One way that I can relate this idea of balancing determination and confidence with openness is in one of my artistic experiences this semester. I have always loved to write stories and I consider myself relatively good at it. But more than that, I have always wanted to be a great storyteller, someone who can speak in a way that is powerful and enchanting. In one of my classes I decided to challenge myself quite a bit by telling a story to the class. I decided not to allow myself to have any extra embellishments such as artwork or movement, or music, or anything else that I could hide behind while I tell my story. In addition to this, I made sure not to prepare the story at all. I committed to remaining in the moment and allowing the story to come through me. The experience was invigorating. I turned of my critique and the part of my brain that wished to plan ahead and formulate the story’s details in terms of some overall meaning or conclusion. I simply became the character and let the story become whatever it may. I felt what Nachmanovitch (1990) described, “In improvisation there is only one time: This is what computer people call real time.” (p. 18) In this improvisation there was only one time, now, and it felt so real and genuine. I also felt that, even though I was caught up in this story that I was creating, I was not caught up in the typical and habitual story of what I think of myself or how I define myself, in this way I experienced this concept presented by Nachmanovitch, “Faithfulness to the moment and to the present circumstance entails continuous surrender. Perhaps we are surrendering to something delightful, but we still have to give up our expectations and a certain degree of control--give up being safely wrapped in our own story.” (p. 21) I gave up being safely wrapped up in a planned story.The Genius
One of my favorite writers, Elizabeth Gilbert (2009), speaks of different ways of thinking about creativity. Her ideas relate to the way that I approached the storytelling experience and a lot about the ways that I am trying to look at all forms of art that I create. Gilbert talks about how she has researched the way that ancient Greeks and Romans used to define the word “genius.” She explains how they believed that a person had a genius, not was a genius. This created a healthier distance for people to be seen as carriers of this inspiration and creativity, so when they worked there was not that same pressure that we often feel now that everything we do defines our worth as a person. In the eyes of the Greeks and Romans, we would just be people working to carry out this “genius” that was visiting us and sending us gifts. Gilbert also explains ways that people she has met have incorporated this sort of thinking into the way that they create. She describes how the American poet Ruth Stone who is now in her 90’s claims that she was younger and she would be working in the fields a poem would come to her, she said, like a train. Stone would feel the rumbling of it and she would run to her house so that she could write it down as it passed through her. She said that sometimes she would not be fast enough and the poem would continue on “looking for another poet” or sometimes she would catch it just as it had gone through and grab it by the tail end and pull it back to her, and in these cases the poem would be written down on the paper completely backwards. Another example that Gilbert references is the musician Tom Waits. She said that when she interviewed him, he told her about a time that he was driving and a glimpse of a beautiful melody came to him but he could not record it or work with it because, of course, he was driving. She said that Waits told her that he started to get very anxious but then he stopped himself from feeling this way and he spoke aloud to this inspiration and asked it if it could not tell that he was driving at that moment, and if it really wanted to exist, it should come back at a better time. Gilbert relates all of this that she has learned to the way that she looks at her own writing process. She said that she would describe herself not as an artist who goes from one moment of inspiration to another, but as a mule who works really hard, and occasionally, she does see this glimpse of inspiration, or “genius.” As she puts it, she shows up for her job as a writer, and she allows this mysterious part to remain something that is separate from who she is. In a way she is conquering this dilemma: “And to do art only for the high feeling of completion and connectedness in the moment of inspiration would be like making love only for the moment of orgasm.” (Nachmanovitch, 1990, p. 18) She is doing the work for the sake of doing it, not just to reach those moments of inspiration. This is something that I am struggling with my own artwork and many aspects of my life. It is also something that I think could really speak to the way that we, as expressive therapists are really not only guiding our clients to create for that moment of artistic genius. If anything we may be hoping for them to reach an “aha” moment in terms of their selves, but we are not working with them with the intention of guiding them to create something that will be beautiful and praised in terms of the general standards of our culture. A Witness
Another way that I find motivation to work in this more present way is when I am working with someone else, or in the presence of someone else. As human beings, we all long for connection and we perceive ourselves and our environments with the help of input from others. This can sometimes be healthy and sometimes it is not. The way that it can allow us to be more so in the present moment, though, is often a positive thing. In working with another person, or an expressive therapist, the individual exploring through creativity may be able to stay more so in the present moment instead of getting caught up in their own minds and the habits of their own minds. “When we drop the blinders of our own preconceptions, we are virtually propelled by every circumstance into the present time and the present mind...” (Nachmanovitch, 1990, p. 22) While working with my art buddy, I can strong experiences of remaining in the moment and worked through some blocks that I was feeling at first arriving. In one meeting, I was feeling very still and quiet. I created a piece (Fig. 1) that was interesting and symmetrical, but not very dynamic. I was enjoying myself but I was not entirely there. Then I witnessed my partner creating something very dynamic and I was instantly inspired to begin dancing the way that the work made me feel. After that I began working on an art piece that was much more free and dynamic and finally, I turned my first piece into something that was much more natural and something that I felt much more connected to (Fig. 2). As I have been working with my art buddy this semester, I have also been comparing our experiences to those with the art buddy whom I worked with in the previous semester. One big difference was that my last art buddy and I started with a lot more plans before working. I have realised that I do not necessarily have a preference, though. In terms of the practicality of techniques in expressive therapy I feel that there is a time for leaning toward either side of the spectrum. I like the way that Knill, Barba, and Fuchs (2004) describe it when they say, “The difference between the goal-oriented action of the game and the circular dance of play can be viewed as a difference in the structure of time, which is linear in the directed activities of a game, but circular in play.” (p. 24) In the context that they were speaking, they were praising the power of play, but I believe that the key is to know when to lean toward more of a “game” technique when someone needs some guidance. I do ultimately agree with them, though, that there needs to be emphasis on play. Conclusion
“We can lead an active life in the world without being entangled in scripts or rigid expectations: doing without being too attached to the outcome, because the doing is it’s own outcome.” (Nachmanovitch, 1990, p. 19)
I am allowing this philosophy to guide me as I explore issues of who I am as an artist, who I am as a person, and who I am as an expressive therapist. I am working toward a point where I will be “ready” and where I will have figured everything out, but the work that I am doing right now is teaching me the work that I will do with my clients. The work that I am doing now will hopefully send me into a more comfortable place that I am in currently, but I think that this work will continue throughout my life. McNiff (2008) says, “In our work within the expressive arts therapies I consider the immersion in uncertainty, resistance to expression, feelings of expressive inadequacy, confusion, and other inhibiting emotions to be the defining and essential features of practice.” (p. 20) So here I am doing just that, feeling uncomfortable, resistant and confused. I must remind myself that what I am learning now is valuable towards the work that I will be doing later on with clients. The more I experience, the more I will be able to understand and relate to.
As I look back on when I first began the expressive therapies program I am starting to really see the depth that I am getting into in my own identity as an artist, a person, and a therapist. When I wrote my first paper for the program I talked about why I was choosing to do this work and I talked about motivations such as desires to have a large and lasting affect on society. The idea that by helping one person you change the way that they are with other people and perhaps inspire him or her to also support others in his or her life. Now I am dealing more so with the nitty gritty of it. It is all becoming a little more raw and real. As opposed to merely focusing on the way that I can bring meaning to my life, I am also exploring the motivations behind that in greater depth. The motivation and positive lights all have their shadows. “In creative work we play undisguisedly with the fleetingness of our own life, with some awareness of our own death.” (Nachmanovitch, 1990, p. 23) There is now a strength that I am gaining by exploring those raw and human fears and uncertainties that exist within me and I am allowing myself to have the struggle of identity that everyone I encounter will also be in some stage of. Sometimes it feels overwhelming that I am doing this not only as a person, but as an artist, and an expressive therapist as well, but everyone has multiple identities, environments, and expectations that they are working through.
References
E Gilbert. (2009, February). Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity [Video File]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html. (2011, April 18).Knill, P., Barba, H., & Fuchs, M. (2004). Minstrels of soul: Intermodal expressive therapy. Toronto: EGS Press.McNiff, S. (2008). Creating with the shadow: Reflections on Stephen K. Levine’s contributions to expressive arts therapy. In E.G. Levine & P. Antze (Eds.), In praise of poiesis: The arts and human existence. (20-31). Toronto: EGS Press.
Nachmanovitch, S. (1990). Free play: The power of improvisation in life and the arts. New York: Tarcher/Putnam.
FiguresFig. 1
Fig. 2
Additional Artistic Documentation
