The Artist’s Block

Recently, a friend asked me for advice because she had begun to dread going into the studio. I took the question very seriously because while a musician, I had a full on, catastrophic block that led ultimately to my putting my instrument away for fifteen years. Later, about ten or twelve years into my career as a visual artist, I had an equally rough block that I eventually got through. Blocks are natural. They happen to everyone. Unfortunately, people don’t talk about blocks much. I find it particularly distressing that experienced artists who have been through blocks don’t often share their experience with younger artists facing blocks for the first time.

Let me begin by describing my two blocks in greater detail. Soon after leaving music school, I moved close to New York. During that period I would listen to the best avant-garde jazz composers during the day and work on my own compositions at night. I became more and more aware of how naive my compositions were in comparison to those of my heroes. I ultimately became depressed about my work and began to freeze up. Hoping to get some good advice, I called Chick Corea, the great jazz pianist. He, of all people, could have given me genuine advice about blocks, learned through personal experience. Instead, he just tried to talk me into becoming a Scientologist. Apparently that would solve everything. I didn’t become a Scientologist, my block became catastrophic and I stopped being a musician.

Many years later, after I had been a visual artist for at least ten years, I took a five month trip to Europe. From my beginnings as an artist until that trip, I had been working on a consistently evolving direction in figurative drawing and painting. When I returned from that trip I tried just picking up where I had left off but found I couldn’t. Doing more of my familiar kind of work was like pulling teeth. I had lost all my motivation for that direction. I didn’t know what to do. I tried all sorts of things to no avail. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I was no longer an artist. I had no ideas, no motivation, no momentum, no enthusiasm. I decided it was over, that I had come to my end of my line as an artist. So I decided to quit, but I made a deal with myself that I wouldn’t quit for nine months.

I wrote “Nine Months” on the wall of my studio. For nine months I forced myself to work every day, to do something, anything to keep my hands moving. Many of the things I tried were idiotic. I tried landscape drawing (not so idiotic). I made illustrated journal entries. I created ridiculous board games with primitive cartoons. I even traced other drawings just to keep busy. Most of those days in the studio were truly excruciating. Finally, I arranged a marathon figure session with one of my favorite models. The session was to be six hours, though three was my typical limit. At about four hours in, something broke. I was too tired to do my usual thing any longer, so I just started swinging my arms around on great big paper, using a huge marker. I didn’t look at the picture while I was making it. I just moved physically the way I wanted to and let hundreds of marks pile up, contradicting each other, crossing each other, not lining up, not making sense, not building on one another. It felt good to work this new way. I had no idea what would get made, what what I was doing would look like. I made a bunch of these huge, ambiguous, perhaps senseless drawings, then looked at them all. They made a new kind of sense, very different from my old work, in fact inconceivable from the framework of my old work. While my old work moved consistently toward clarification, this new work avoided clarification and developed implied structure through intentional ambiguity. I was excited about this new direction. My motivation started returning and building. I got so I couldn’t wait to make more work each day. I have been riding this new direction for over twenty years now and my enthusiasm for it has only grown. I may have another block at some point but I have confidence that I will be able to move through it if and when it happens.

Here are my thoughts on blocks. I think each direction an artist takes has a shelf life. The direction begins. The artist learns more and more. The work develops a degree of sophistication, a consistent language that the artist knows how to manipulate. The expression gets better and better, clearer, more expert. These things are getting pretty damned good. Eventually the work becomes repetitive. It feels to me at that stage like the work becomes self-parody. It gets stale and it becomes hard for the artist to keep making this crap.

Now the real problems begin. The old work has lost its appeal but what shall the new work be? For the longest time, the artist tries to formulate the new direction as somehow an outgrowth of the old direction, but that won’t work. The new work has to come from an altogether new conception, something inconceivable from the framework of the old direction, something that is not implicit in the old work, something truly new, actually different. I think the hardest thing is letting go of the old framework and embracing something unformed, not known. The only guide one can have at this point is how it feels to work, not what it will look like because one doesn’t know that yet. Another challenge is that this new work will be inescapably primitive compared to the old work. The old work was at its point of greatest maturity, in full bloom. The new work is in its infancy and can’t yet stand up to the maturity of the old work. However, as this new direction matures it will eventually reach a greater richness than the former work allowed.

I see this cycle in the work of many artists who have inspired me. The most obvious example to my eyes is Cezanne. If you ever get a chance to study an oeuvre complete of Cezanne’s drawings, you will see over and over the cycle of a direction maturing until it is in full bloom, then becoming repetitive. At that point Cezanne lets go of the old direction and embraces a new one that is comparatively primitive. The new direction, though primitive at first, eventually surpasses the sophistication of the previous direction. This cycle happens time and time again over the course of Cezanne’s career.

To conclude, as I said at the beginning of this essay, blocks are natural. Each direction has its own lifespan. Often an interruption in one’s work will expose the exhaustion of a direction. After that, the process of finding the next direction can often be painful, partly because one is so fluent in the dead direction that it is difficult to think any other way. The birth of the new direction is often painful. The important thing is that the new direction can only emerge through work. Thomas Edison was quoted as saying that great ideas come from the muscles. What he was getting at, I believe, is that problems get solved not by thinking about them in the abstract, but rather through making work, wrestling with the problem through making. I don’t think for a moment that my personal experience resolving a block represents the only way or even the typical way. I’m sure there are plenty of variations of my experience and plenty of paths through blocks that were nothing like mine. The main thing, though, is to understand that blocks are OK, that blocks are common and solvable. The solution won’t necessarily be easy. Often, probably usually, the solution is excruciating, but don’t give up. I would have been a far better musician had I fought through that first block. I know I became a far better artist by doing battle with and vanquishing my second block.

Matching the Scales of Impulse and Action / Matisse and Cezanne

Bare with me on this one. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot, but it is hard to put into words.

There is a quality in mature Matisse paintings that I think we all should aspire to, but that quality takes real attention and practice. The quality is a match between the scale of his impulses and the scale of his actions. Let me describe some examples. If Matisse places a vessel with goldfish in a composition, then feels the composition would be improved by the vessel’s being moved to the right, he begins to remake the vessel in the changed location. He realizes in mid stream that the changed reading in the composition already reads, even though he hasn’t completed the new vessel and hasn’t erased the old vessel. He stops, leaves the ambiguity, and moves on to other responses, rather than finishing the change. This refusing to finish is significant. Matisse is trying to do something to the composition. Whether the vessel is completed or not is irrelevant and thus is ignored. A new painter would think, “The vessel isn’t finished. This will be confusing. I need to finish the vessel and clear away any evidence of the earlier version.” Ideas about objects, consistency, completion, etc. would push the beginner to keep going, tidying things up, long after the generating impulse has been satisfied.

This problem emerges all the time in observation based drawing. The beginner will notice something about the angle of the eye and make a slash that reflects that discovery. That slash alone may fully express what the drawer noticed, but then the drawer will fill in all kinds of irrelevant detail because otherwise we won’t know it is an eye, right? What Matisse is so great at, is realizing when the impulse has been acted upon, then moving on. As a result, his expression feels as if conveyed through minimums. There is no gratuitous information.

I think the problem for beginners has to do with cycling all impulses through the language centers of the mind. One has a compositional impulse, a visual impulse, an emotional impulse, but then we feel we need to characterize it as an idea and we follow through, completing the idea. Matisse stops before reaching that point. Once he has addressed the visual, visceral impulse, he moves on.

I think Matisse’s freedom to move also comes from understanding that he is making a painting, that the rules of the world of painting and drawing are entirely different from the rules of literal reality. The painter or drawer is shooting for evidence of a visual emotional experience and once that experience is expressed, further articulation is irrelevant, in fact distracting.

One problem that arises often in class is that students like their short works better than their longer pieces. In short pieces, time is at a premium, so students start working on vague hunches, faster than they can think. There begins to be a natural synchronization between the scale of impulses and the scale of actions. As soon as a piece allows more time, the student starts turning impulses into ideas that must be followed through on. If a student notices a moment of the edge of a shoulder, instead of simply acting on that small impulse, the student says, “This is how I am doing the edge of this figure. I should continue this down the upper arm, through the forearm, down to the hand. They’re all connected, right?” Yes, anatomically in the physical world. But an art work is built of discoveries, not generalizations. The discovery was limited to a moment of the shoulder. It then got turned into a rule for the whole arm. The discovery was transformed into an idea, a generalization of a small moment.

So the problem isn’t a problem of short pieces vs. long pieces. It is a shift from the responsiveness of a short piece to an entirely different way of making in a longer piece. Great artists constantly make pieces that take weeks, yet maintain the freshness of short pieces. Those artists have found ways to stay in the working framework of short pieces regardless of the time available.

I’d like to go into a little more detail on the idea driving the shoulder arm example. Beginners believe everything has to line up or it won’t make sense. Specifically, if one has marked something about the shoulder, then notices something about the upper arm, there is a compulsion to make the upper arm discovery connect to or line up with the shoulder discovery. In the literal world of surgery, the upper arm and shoulder must connect. But in a drawing, one may notice something entirely new about the size or location of the upper arm that calls into question or contradicts the position of the shoulder mark. The beginner will compromise the upper arm impulse and discovery to make it fit the shoulder that is already on the page. At that point the mark starts to tell less than what the artist knows and again the piece begins to stiffen because of a mismatch between impulse and action, all because of the intrusion of idea. The amazing thing is, the brain naturally creates a coherent understanding of anything observed by collaging together disparate bits of observation. Notice the next time you look at someone, how many times you have to shift the focus of your eyes to take them all in. You have an experience of the whole image made from collaging different fragments. If you are at all close to the subject, you can’t take the whole in from a single look. So the brain is already incredibly adept at making a coherent whole from a variety of fragments. I often find in drawing that if the artist frankly presents the disparate truths discovered through observation without forcing them to line up, the drawing actually carries more sense and content than if the artist tries to conceal the contradictions by fitting all the pieces “sensibly” together.

The absolute king of simultaneous contradictory marks is Cezanne. Look through his drawings and late water colors and you will see again and again evidence of what I call independence in his marks. Each time he notices something, he marks it where he is seeing it at the moment, regardless of where earlier marks suggest it should be. The result is that at a micro level his work is very out of focus, but at a macro level, the work has a much looser and more convincing implication of what he is observing because the viewer’s eye puts together all the content implied by the various competing marks.So between Matisse and Cezanne one can see superb evidence of matched scales of impulse and action. When one generalizes from an impulse, the scale of action is larger than the impulse. The result is formulaic repetition of an action that in the first instance was expression of a discovery, but in subsequent repetitions is simply autopilot and deadens the work. At the opposite end, when one compromises a discovery by twisting it to fit earlier decisions, the scale of action is less than the scale of impulse and equally sucks vitality and content from the work. Both come from associating the source impulse with ideas rather than acting simply on the impulse then moving on. To keep impulse and action in synch one has to act before or below the territory of idea, then move on before idea gets superimposed. It’s very hard to do at first because the idea part of our brain has such enormous self confidence and hates being ignored, but in the case of art making, ideation often compromises rather than enhances the clarity of expression.