Look Beyond The Word

Posted on April 6, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

758. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

According to my dictionary, an entrepreneur is a risk taking businessperson. This is not much of a definition. The word is French in origin and it meant to undertake. It was a verb. To get out of bed and undertake the tasks of the day makes us all entrepreneurs. Especially these days when risk, according to the dictionary, means that there is a chance something might go wrong. I’ve yet to live a day when everything went right. For instance, last night I opened a jar of curry powder with too much enthusiasm and curry exploded everywhere. I think there is a more appropriate definition of an entrepreneur: someone whose not invested in things going right. In fact, entrepreneurs look for things going wrong because that provides the opportunity necessary for new creation. Entrepreneurs see the world beyond right and wrong. They see opportunity. Risk has nothing to do with it.

An artist, as defined by the dictionary, is a creator of art, a performer, a person with skills or a cunning person. The origin of this word is either French or Latin. We are cautioned in the dictionary not to confuse artist with artisan. An artisan is engaged in a craft. An artist is engaged in a fine art though I can’t find any mention of what distinguishes a craft from a fine art. From the definition of artist, the phrase “cunning person” shouted to me so following the word chain I learned that cunning means crafty and deceitful, clever or cute. So, artisans, unlike artists, must not be deceitful, clever or cute though they are, by definition crafty. In the Venn diagram of artist and artisan, craftiness is the crossover. So, to sum up: artists are cute, crafty, clever and deceitful while creating something fine. Artisans are rough, dull and honest while also crafty. Can one be crafty and dull at the same time? I have a more appropriate definition for artist: someone who lives beyond the abstractions of thought. They engage with what is there, not what they think is there. In other words, someone who has made presence a priority in his or her life is an artist. Artists guide their community to presence.

Words like “risk” or “fine” blind us. They distance us from our potential because we think we need to take risks to be entrepreneurial; we think we need to do something fine to be and artist. Artists and entrepreneurs explore. They engage. They discover. They act first and then make meaning of their experiences. They master their “doing” because they are not invested in win/lose games. They step into the unknown without reservation. Artistry, like entrepreneurship, defines a way of being not something achieved.

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Make Space

Posted on April 2, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

754. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

I am cleaning out and clearing space. It is spring and spring-cleaning is normal at this time of year but my impulse to make space is deeper than the cycle of spring. I’m giving stuff away. I just threw away half of my clothes (they needed throwing away) and the other half will soon go to the thrift store.

I’m purging the studio. I installed paintings at Geraldine’s Counter yesterday and Gary, the owner, asked why I had not included prices on the labels. “They are old paintings,” I said, “and I’m in the mood to bargain.” I don’t want the paintings to come back. I need the space for the new creation. I need the space for ideas.

Possibilities require space. Sometimes life stories get over crowded with drama and details. Sometimes our days get too crowded with tasks. Possibilities will never shoulder their way into cramped courters. Why should they? Lack of space is a signal to the universe that you are doing what you want to do. Or, lack of space is a signal to the universe that you are afraid of doing what you want to do; existential hording leaves no room for possibilities to breathe.

Once, I ran a school and I encouraged my students to look out the window. Daydreaming is intensely important for healthy living and a vital creative life. Daydreaming is space creation. I encouraged my students to imagine. I encouraged them to breathe and make space and wander. I encouraged them to explore and discover and uncover. We were constantly cleaning out the building. We were constantly making space for the new. Those lessons are coming home to me again this spring. On my horizon a tsunami of potential is flowing toward me. I know it is coming because I am making space.

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Open The Door

Posted on March 27, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

748. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.” George Sand

The first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is that all of life is suffering. In this context the predicament of the artist is no different than that of a plumber or a president though I’ve yet to find a plumber who considers suffering necessary to his or her vocation. With artists (in the USA) suffering is central to the narrative. It is an expectation and seems to be a prerequisite. Why do artists think they need to suffer or believe that suffering unlocks the door to their artistry? It doesn’t.

Here are some conditions central to unlocking the door to artistry: curiosity, experimentation, exploration, discovery, passion, investigation, play, “What if…?”

We do not easily walk into our shadows. One of the roles of artist is to go where others choose not to go. A walk into the shadow may be uncomfortable but it is equally as liberating. An artist is supposed to see what others cannot and sometimes that is painful. An artist often acts as a bridge between worlds of perception, living on the edge of the village, translating the signs. As the god of transitions and boundaries, Hermes was of this ilk. He was also the protector of poets. Sometimes it is the role of the artist to travel into the netherworlds to retrieve a truth or a lost soul. Orpheus descended into the underworld to reclaim Eurydice. He did not trust so he lost what he most desired. His artistry was a gift of the gods. His suffering was from distrust of the gods’ gift.

At times artistry may be solitary or scary but it is always transforming. Always. An artist rarely “fits” the social norms but continually serves the health and growth of the community. Artists are transformational.

The coaching work I do with artists (myself included) often requires a stroll into this misguided ideal or expectation of suffering. What are the underlying assumptions that make suffering or madness an erroneous precondition for artistry? This is what I know: suffering is what happens when we ignore our innate artistry or smother our essential creative spark. Suffering is not a prerequisite to anything. Suffering is a sign that the artistic door is closed.

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Amplify The Possibilities

Posted on March 15, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

736. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Vanessa’s business is called Visual Minutes. She draws conversations. She maps discussions. She and a colleague, Amber, mapped the recent Transformational Presence Summit in Vught, Holland that Alan and I facilitated. Her work was gorgeous, informative and inspiring. The dynamic of a group changes when there is an artist working in the room. When a group’s words and thoughts serve as the source of a communal image, something shifts. A loop forms: people visit the image during breaks. They take ownership of what emerges. The images inspire conversations and the conversations show up as images. The resonance amplifies the possibilities.

Over the four days of our summit the mural began to stretch around the room. Soon, we were surrounded by our conversation; the four walls of the conference center were changed by Vanessa’s work; we no longer sat in a generic space but occupied a room specific to us, designed for and by us, a chronicle of our unique wisdom. The art transformed us. We were 35 people from 11 countries made one through our intention and the circle that the art invoked.

Vanessa shared with me a letter written to her from Canadian artist Robert Genn. She thought it might tickle my imagination. He writes about artists as a tribe (a universal tribe). Here are three snippets from the letter worthy of tickling the imagination and also descriptive of Vanessa’s gift to the world:

“The idea that art has the ability to rise above religion, nationality and race is well understood.”

“…I get the idea that art might even be a vehicle for peace. We artists certainly bring a worldview based on respect, observation, play, learning, celebration and mutuality. In the machinations of humanity, these traits must surely hold some value.”

“We dine at a table of many nations. As artists we celebrate our creative joy and toast our mutual humanity. While we all speak with some sort of accent, we do so in the universal language of art. At your table, when you get a chance, please consider raising a glass to our tribe. It is a tribe beyond tribes, and in my heart of hearts I believe our tribe has an illustrious future.”

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Find Your Voice

Posted on March 1, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

722. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Yesterday I worked with teachers and students in an art cadre. We explored what it means to make art.

I am resistant to write, “We made art” because it implies that the “art” was a product, a thing separate from the process. It implies that the “doing” was incidental and the outcome was the thing called “art.” That notion is upside down. The art is not the outcome. The art is the process yet we have no language to correctly express it. What happened in our art cadre was essential. The students and teachers recognized that a great product requires a great process; the process is the essential.

We focused entirely on process because I know that students and teachers alike are all the time squeezed into demonstrating outcomes. They are forced to let go the primary in service to the secondary. Art teachers are generally under siege and always have to prove their value to school districts because school districts see “art” as an incidental. Consequently, art is often taught as a product and therefore not art. It is misunderstood as something non-essential.

There is an entire industry known as “self-help” dedicated to a single, simple impulse: the full expression of the self: how to give full voice to perceptions and ideas without impediment. In other words, how do we get out of our own way? This is a question of process and reachable through “art” when art is understood. Businesses invest fortunes to “brainstorm” new ideas, to see patterns and give form to new conceptions. Perception is the province of “art.” I hear whining from the glass towers of commerce: “Why aren’t schools producing self-directed, critical thinking workers?” Answer: dedicating the focus to outcomes and answer regurgitation (in other words, beat the art out of people) will always produce a hiring pool of anesthetized answer regurgitators. We get what we produce. Self-expression and critical thinking are sister skills. Quash one and we quell the other. Art would seem to be an essential skill for business.

One of the saddest moments of the day came after the cadre. Two teachers stayed to talk. They told me that they knew what they are doing to kids (yes…doing TO kids) is wrong. They are required to produce products. They believe that they have no voice in the matter. They told me that they agreed with everything we explored but must serve the product expectations of their district. I didn’t ask the question I wanted to ask. There seemed no point. I wandered when they would wake up and recognize that supporting a system that they knew to be harming kids was also taking a toll on their health and lives. Voice is not something other people give you. It is something that you have to agree to give away. Voicelessness is a terrible thing to exchange in order to follow a rule, especially if you do not believe in the premise of the rule.

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See The Magic

Posted on February 20, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

713. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Today I saw thousands of geese fly over the fields at sunset. They were going back to the river for the night. From a distance in the pale blue winter sky, they looked like shimmering strands, forming and reforming, I had the impression that I was looking through a microscope at DNA in flight. And then they flew closer, took on another shape, more dense, all the strands coming together en masse, morphing like magic into a congress of geese. Flying directly over my head their wings took on the gold and purple of the setting sun, shocking me in their transformation. Their direction was specific, intentional, with no visible leader or apparent decision maker; they were of a single mind.

Magic is not the illusion of sawing a person in half; it is not a man who seems to disappear from a locked box. Those things are tricks. Magic is a relationship to something vital and alive. Who would choose to have a relationship with an illusion when it is possible to have a relationship with the setting sun or to participate if only as a witness to a migration that is centuries old? This is why we go to the theatre or visit an artists’ studio; the arts are not illusions they are a relationship to something ancient, a deeply unique human impulse that reaches back millennia. The arts are at one moment both a personal and a shared experience. There is a reason why dictators clamp down on the arts when seizing power: a community with vital living art knows its direction and intention with no visible leader; the decision makers are the stories we tell relative to the actions we take: there is no gap between interests and values. The arts hold the center and when they are lost, the community begins to legislate rather than communicate. Entertainment is, after all, the least of the functions of any art form and become ascendant when rules have replaced stories as the societal glue.

Filed under: Art, Perspective, The Direction of Intention, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »

Allow The Silence

Posted on February 5, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

698. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” Aldous Huxley

There are few things more satisfying to me than closing the studio door, picking up a large brush, turning the up the volume on the music, and giving over to the forces that want to find expression through me. The night before my latest trip, without really meaning to do it, I turned from my computer, saw the canvas stapled on the wall, and the next thing I knew several hours had passed, the music was rattling the windows, and both the canvas and I were covered in paint (it’s why I stopped buying new clothes…). It had been too long since I gave myself over to the call.

I used to draw everyday. It was my practice, my imperative. In recent years I’ve moved on to other practices. I write. I facilitate. I walk. I find the quiet. And then, like a starving man who stumbles into a feast, I disappear without warning into a painting gluttony. It is a different kind of quiet, ferocious, vibrant, and necessary. There is no thought; my body takes over and the painting comes through: silence in the center of a hurricane of movement and sound. When finally I step away from the canvas and come back into my body, I discover an image in front of me. It is less correct to say, “I did that,” and more correct to ask, “What just happened?” I’ve spent hours of my life standing in front of paintings that I just painted, thinking, “Whoa. Look at that!”

Once, many years ago, Jim looked through all of my recent work and asked, “What is the significance of the three balls in your paintings?” I had no idea what he was talking about so he pulled out of the rack ten paintings, lined them up, and showed me that each had three balls as if some unseen figure was juggling them. I was gob-smacked. I studied the paintings for a few minutes and said, “Whoa. Look at that!” Jim laughed.

The silence is not empty; it is full. It is rich and vibrant. The silence is what happens when we get out of our own way, open to the forces, and let them come through. Words like “art” or “transformation” or “perspective” or any other word can’t contain all the meaning that becomes available when we learn to step out of the way and allow the silence.

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Walk Toward The Vanishing Point

Posted on January 17, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

679. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

The other day in Melissa’s class, the students were drawing pictures. They were learning about perspective. Most were drawing according to single point perspective: all lines meet at a single spot called the vanishing point. In the drawings, roads and train tracks ran toward the horizon, telephone poles and barns all followed the lines disappearing into a single point.

The lesson will continue for a long time. Now that the students have drawn lines to a single point they will begin exploring the greater implications of perspective. They will discover for themselves that things look radically different according to where you stand. They will learn that you can never occupy another person’s perspective so you will never be able to see what they see (imagine the implications); they will discover that perspective is personal and as varied at there are people on the planet. The possibilities of an exploration in perspective go on and on. We forget that at one point in history artists were mathematicians. Artists were scientists. There wasn’t the separation or the story that we tell today. Imagine the implications for education if we weren’t so blinded by subject separations and so singly prejudiced against the arts. Music is math, after all. Color is either chemistry or optics depending on whether you are mixing paint or light.

The next day, we met with other teachers, each sharing their experiences in the classroom. Beth (an amazing educator) listened to Melissa’s story and said, “I love the term, ‘vanishing point!’ There’s a whole world happening beyond that point and we just can’t see it.” She was lost in thought for a moment and then exclaimed, “Beyond the vanishing point anything is possible!”

Beth deals in possibilities. She is one of the few people I’ve known who recognizes that we actually live at the vanishing point though most of us pretend that we know what’s going to happen. Beth courts the vanishing point. She plays with it. She tries things just to see what will happen. Hang out with Beth and you will jump in puddles, race through tall grass, and take a turn down a road just to see where it leads. She knows that when you walk toward the vanishing point you walk into possibilities. Beth knows that life is vital in the direction of the vanishing point; the foreground of the picture is the present; it is where we currently stand. Beth knows it is the deepest human impulse to say to your self, “I wonder what’s over that hill?” And then follow the impulse. Beth knows this greatest of human impulses is at the heart of great education. Beth knows like Melissa knows, it is so simple and so possible when they are allowed to walk with their students toward the vanishing point instead of being forced to turn away from the horizon and pretend that there is something standardized about learning.

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Flip it!

Posted on January 7, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

669. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

I am in New England and it is winter. This morning as the sun rose, as the sky progressed through purple and orange to steel grey there was a very light snow falling. The world was so quiet that it inspired inner quiet. I think this is what is supposed to happen in winter: we are meant to slow down, get quiet, to go inside, reflect, keep warm, catch up on some sleep, and touch the eternal in ways that are only accessible when the days are short and the ground is frozen.

Yesterday, as Alan and I planned the summit that we will facilitate in Holland in March, we strayed from our task and talked about separation and connectivity. I am oriented into the world according to my cultural defaults: separate from all of nature (including my own), a dominator, steeped in the notion that I can control things and given to the hubris that one of the things I can control is nature. And yet, I am at odds with my orientation. I don’t believe any of it. My life’s work (for myself and others) is to flip it, to offer a different, healthier narrative.

Once, many years ago, when I was in Bali, I had a conversation that helped me clarify what would become the work of my life. I was explaining to a Balinese man what it was to be an artist in America and he was deeply perplexed by my premise. He said to me, “But, all people are artists; all people are creative.” To be alive is to be creative. It is a mark of the culture of separation to believe that you are or are not creative, to see creativity as a limited resource or a perhaps an endowment for the special. It is a characteristic of a culture of connectivity to understand that all of life is creative and to be alive is to be a participant in the vibrant, creative, ever changing flow of life – as a vibrant, creative, ever changing being.

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Open The Door

Posted on December 17, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

648. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

When I was a kid I was standing on a barrel so I could reach the pencil sharpener. I sharpened my pencil with such fury that I tipped the barrel over and landed on the pencil: it stabbed my right palm and the lead snapped off. I was in a hurry because I was drawing a picture and I wanted to capture the image before the magic dissipated. That’s how I experienced artistry as a boy: a magic door opened. I saw an image on a blank piece of paper and it was my task to bring it into the visible world before the door closed. Sometimes I knew I had lots of time; sometimes I knew the door was only going to be open for a moment and it was a race to get enough of the image so that I might complete it after the door closed. I had a muse and she lived on the other side of the door. I spent many hours staring at blank sheets of paper willing her to open the channel and send me an image.

My fall off the barrel was over 40 years ago and I still carry the lead mark in my palm. It has become a reminder of the magic. It took me 30 years after the fall to realize that I had control over the door; the magic was not separate from me. I merely had to turn the knob, I simply needed to open and receive the image. Like two people in love but afraid to reveal their feelings I came to realize that the muse was waiting for me and I was waiting for the muse. She wanted me to turn the knob and say, “I’m here.” I was waiting for her to turn the knob and say, “I’m here.”

I look at the pencil mark on my palm when I need to remind myself that there is no door; my muse and I are now one. There is no hurry. In fact, what I came to understand was “the door” opened when I became present. As a boy, staring at a blank piece of paper, counting my breaths, I unwittingly developed a nice meditation practice and when I dropped into the moment the door opened. I work with many people and what I’ve learned is that magic is not unique to me – it is available to everyone. We are magic – all of us. If the nozzle is closed it is because we stand in the past arguing for the wound or seeking a future place, somewhere out there where there is magic to be claimed. My work is to say, “Slow down. There is nothing broken so there is nothing to be fixed. Look at what is right in front of you. Stand here and nowhere else: let the world see that you are magic.”

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