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Nov 11, 2020Liked by Heather Havrilesky

My favourite definition of art vs craft:

Craft is mastering a medium for the sake of mastery

Art is mastering a medium for the sake of self-expression

It's subtle, there's overlap! But damn did finding this definition change my view about the creative things I like to do in my spare time. If I'm not feeling like I'm expressing myself well, then I'm simply practicing *mastery*. It's a fail-safe state.

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Nov 11, 2020Liked by Heather Havrilesky

Okay. I have SO many feelings about this. I feel like they might spew out of me in all directions. I want to gush about everything. And, but, so... immediately some part of my jumps in and says 'You won't make sense, people won't get it. You just want attention. Don't you think you've commented on these threads too much? MORE THAN ONCE!?! Who do you think you are?!'. This is a very subtle background process because it happens all the time, or has for many years. I grew up being told that I was very special and talented, but also that no one understood me and that I could never make it in the world as myself. I'd have to lean to play by everyone else's rules, 'pay my dues'. I've lived my life in a very dualistic way, where all my intuitions, needs and desires were kept under tight wraps, for my eyes only to keep them safe from anyone who might misunderstand them or shoot them down. The past two years I have been approaching and retreating from the barrier that separates these two worlds. I'm risking more (like by posting this weird rambly shit here) and the more I risk the more the world opens up to me in ridiculously beautiful ways. People seem to see me, fully. Yesterday I sat in the park with someone I have long admired. We talked about letting your messiest desires unfold, about following a feeling and letting it become a thought then an idea and then following it to the end of the earth. And how that is the FUCKING POINT. Of corse that sounds basic, I'm not managing to convey it here, but it was a gift from the universe for sure. I know I haven't mentioned art once yet... because for me it feels so inseparable from living life. It's completely a religion. It used to be my own private religion. But, what the hell, I'm accepting converts.

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Nov 11, 2020Liked by Heather Havrilesky

I really like what you say here about art being more like a religion than a hobby for you. Once someone I love referred to writing as my hobby and I was outraged! Writing is my life's work! Writing is the whole point! How dare you! But seriously, when I'm feeling down about what I have accomplished writing wise, I try to just focus on returning to the Google doc I enter each day, writing the date, writing, "I am worthy. I am confident," and then fucking word vomiting whatever is happening around me—the weather, my feelings, the feelings I'm repressing, what my partner and I talked about that morning, how my cat is acting. I often pull in little words of advice or affirmation from other writers / artists / people that glimmer for me that day (Heather is heavily featured). Something that has also featured heavily this year in my Google doc is a word of advice I got from writer, Fariha Roisin, which she got from another artist, "Maybe a person gets better by just letting herself be who she is." For me, it has not been a banner year for ritzy publications of my poems or friendship for that matter, but it has been a banner year for arriving at the altar of the page and providing my daily sacrifice. To quote Louise Glück: "or was the point always / to continue without a sign?"

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Nov 11, 2020Liked by Heather Havrilesky

I had a councillor back in the day who told me “Wow you live a creative life” and I think about that often. For a long time I desperately wanted to be an actual literal artist—and this was when my attention changed from being an artist to living a creative life.

I recently started doing art with the attitude of finding joy and it’s been so freeing and amazing and frustrating and messy. It makes me feel alive.

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Nov 11, 2020Liked by Heather Havrilesky

For a long time, my ideas lived inside me and I was afraid to express them--that they would not turn out as I had hoped, that I would be misunderstood, maybe even thought crazy. Finally I realized I needed to feel the fear and do it anyway, and paid for some gallery space before I had even begun the work. Thus, I would either be having a show of bare white walls (that could be a statement, too) or I would be putting up whatever came out of this mixture of fear and determination. Let me tell you, this was one of the best things that ever happened to me! Keep in mind I am not a "trained" artist and put my project together with house paint and materials from around the house. That is okay! Yeah, I did it! And ultimately I did it because there was something I wanted to express and I was okay with others possibly not "getting it". PS-Lots of people "got it", but that no longer was my central concern!

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Nov 11, 2020Liked by Heather Havrilesky

Im an artist, AKA, someone who has made and does make art. I was not attached to the label for a long time while I wasn't making art, but now I don't mind it. I find conversations about art and beauty of a very abstract nature feel more interesting to me than conversations about art itself. I guess that's because to me art is like prayer (grew up catholic and fairly agnostic now). It's a devotion to something greater than myself that I don't control and can't understand wholly. So I just keep showing up to my table as much as I can and make bad, good, and mediocre things. I see the art as the showing up, not the artwork. That's a byproduct, like maybe the peace or solace you might get from saying a prayer (I mostly only say prayers when I wake up from a nightmare and the room looks warped and weird).

So I'd like to share this, which is deceptively simple:

"I mean that everyone is involved, whether they like it or not, in the construction of their world. So it’s never as given as it actually looks. You are always shaping it and building it. And I feel that from that perspective, that each of us is an artist."

John O'Donahue, in an interview with Krista Tippett for the "On Being" podcast. The conversation is called "The Inner Landscape of Beauty."

Link: https://onbeing.org/programs/john-odonohue-the-inner-landscape-of-beauty-aug2017/

His accented voice is very soothing; maybe listen for that reason alone.

Po

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Nov 11, 2020Liked by Heather Havrilesky

If you haven't read "Art as Therapy" by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong I think you might like it. I've been reading it slowly over the past year. It's very lucid but stirs up so much thinking/dreaming that a page or two is all I get before drifting off. Excerpt from page 5: "A knife is a response to our need, yet inability, to cut. A bottle is a response to our need, yet inability, to carry water. To discover the purpose of art, we must ask what kind of things we need to do with our minds and emotions, but have trouble with."

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Nov 11, 2020Liked by Heather Havrilesky

I'm writing a dissertation about artistic practices that include trauma and public grief. The kind of things I'm interested in are big, giant, room-filling, three-dimensional installations made by women to communicate the magnitude of what they've survived and felt, artworks that hold onto anger and refuse to let it go. I have two favorite quotes about art that really strike me to my core. One is "art is a state of encounter" and one is "art is both a physical thing and the power that infuses it."

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Nov 11, 2020Liked by Heather Havrilesky

Sometimes I come across a kind of pain that only prayer and artistic transmutation can begin to heal.

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I've been wrestling with my creative impulse for more than a year now. It sprung up after years of dormancy, after being crushed as a young person when art was so intensely personal and also I needed so much approval and also needed it to be an outlet where I could be seen and prove myself worthy. College was really the nail in the coffin, so it's been over ten years since I tried to make much of anything.

I think it's a good sign that I'm regularly feeling this urge to create again and it probably points to the decade of therapy that I've done finally paying off. Maybe I've managed to heal a bit. But I can't stop myself from wanting it to look a certain way. I've always been a writer (god that feels embarrassing to say in the comments section of A Real Writer), but it's also always felt like a mediocre, sub-par form of expression for myself. I want to make something visual, to draw or paint or sculpt. Writing feels too obvious, too cheap and naked. Even writing songs would be better, but I'm no musician. I've always felt like I couldn't be allowed to do the easy things, that if it's easy it must be worthless, and I can't let that go. I want to express myself more opaquely with color and line and composition, to make you feel something without having to actually say it. But also sometimes I feel like words just aren't enough. When I really dive into the idea of a project in my head, it's always multimedia. I want to show what I feel in words and sound and image all at once, like a movie, but I don't actually want to make a movie, I don't think. Or maybe I do? Everything is confused and blocked, until the tidal impulse surges through for a minute and I make some small thing in my notebook.

I know the answer is to just sit down and do something every day, whatever I can find the energy or desire for, but it's still too scary more days than not to be quiet enough with myself to do that. Right now I'm just watching the urges and acting on them when I can. One thing that I feel really disappointed about with the pandemic is that I'd planned to take a bunch of creative classes this year to give myself some accountability and structure, but I've been unemployed since March and I'm unenthusiastic about the idea of Zoom-based art classes anyhow. Maybe 2022 will be my year.

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Nov 11, 2020Liked by Heather Havrilesky

My work is going to be really slow for a while post-election, so I'm trying to cultivate more discipline around my arts. In the past I've avoided my creative crafts like the plague on a daily basis, only engaging when I absolutely have to. Especially with writing - it's easier for me to engage with music on a day to day basis, but sitting down to WRITE WORDS feels so bare and naked and uncomfortable I tend not to do it. This month I'm trying to do, every day:

1 hour of writing

1 hour of composing

1 hour of yoga / martial arts

2 hours of guitar practice

Today is day two. I'm terrified I'll fail. But I know that if I don't at least try to cultivate that discipline I will always regret not having done it. Exposure therapy!

This is a little bit of a dry run anyways - I've been saving up money to take a year off work and basically do home grad school - hiring teachers and finding programs as necessary, but trying to leap ahead in all of my disciplines through a period of intense focus. I have a North Node in Sagittarius, so I think I'm supposed to leave the Gemini flightiness behind and learn how to focus that energy like an archer. Back muscles pull, bow flexes, arrow goes into rabbit. It's the back muscles that I'm trying to work on.

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I've been trying to accept that writing is my most reliable path to actually experience emotion, something that's nearly impossible for me otherwise. But I think that's also why I've resisted it for so long. I have these moments where writing feels so easy, so natural, so right. And then it's like I get too close to the whole feelings thing and suddenly stop.

I'm trying to make it a habit now, something I do even when it's hard or it doesn't feel easy. But it's embarrassing. It feels too earnest or too honest or something. Sometimes it feels like I'm getting further away from feeling anything by turning it into a practice instead of this spontaneous thing. But if I don't, I'll only write in frantic sprints once every five years. I'm trying to get comfortable with the discomfort, but it feels like taking an awful tasting medicine sometimes.

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deletedNov 11, 2020Liked by Heather Havrilesky
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