identity | The Direction of Intention

Let’s Dance

Posted on March 14, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

from my cartoon series, FLUB

[This is a response to my dear friend who believes he will someday be worthy to call himself “artist.”]:

There is a trap that every artist must negotiate: the mistaken notion that “artist” is something you achieve. “Artist” is something that you are (and every child is an artist, wouldn’t you agree?). Art is an exploration of life. Some of the greatest artists in history had no training and no experience. They, like you, enjoy playing with various colors and never followed a textbook or a guideline because art doesn’t happen in textbooks and the only guideline that ultimately matters is in the heart of each individual artist. Art is an exploration. It is a relationship with the mystery. It is not a prescription. There isn’t A WAY to do it. There is your way. And my way.

Art is an engagement with something intangible and if it is life giving to you, that is all that matters. It gives you life and you bring it to life and that dance of giving and bringing life is the work of the artist. The viewer will never see what you see because they do not have your eyes or your life experience or your heart. They will see what they see and interpret it according to their life-filters. Some people will love your work, some will hate it, most will be indifferent – and that has nothing to do with you. You can’t (nor should you) determine what they see. A painting or photograph is like a doorway: the viewer can step through or not. They can choose to engage or not to engage and you have no power over what they do or see or feel or think. And, it is vital that you understand that because the notion that you can control what they think is the very thing that leads you to believe that you must pass some credibility test to be deemed and artist. When a viewer engages with a work of art they cease to be a viewer and themselves become an artist. Engagement with art is never passive; it is creative. They enter their own dance of creation. They become creators. Yours is to offer the doorway, not to push people through it.

In truth, the shadow side for the artist in trying to control what other people think is that they give away the essential thing: what they think. Why assign to other people the responsibility for your identity as “artist.” If they like your work then you are an artist? If they hate your work then you are not? You can either serve your heart (art) or please other people but you cannot do both.

I’ve coached a legion of people who set up great studio space for themselves and then never go into it. People are great at creating separation from what they want. They can get close to it (set up the studio) but fear stepping into it (picking up the paint brush) because the act of making art is the act of releasing control. It is to offer without condition. It can be a scary thing to give voice to what you see. It is vulnerable to show your heart to the world. It is only scary until you own it and get out of the trap of valuing other people’s point of view over your own.

Another form of separation is to say, “I will be an artist when I sell my work.” Selling your work does not make you an artist. Making art is what makes you an artist. Acceptance does not make you an artist. Making art is what makes you an artist. 10,000 hours in the studio will make you better and better (meaning freer and freer to express) but it will not make you an artist. You are an artist in the first hour and an artist in the 10,000th hour because you are exploring your relationship with life. You might have better mastery of the tools in the 10,000th hour but “master of tool” and “artist” are two distinctly different things. The artist uses the tool, the tool does not define the artist.

You have the courage to go to your studio and get lost in an exploration of life through image and color. You lose all sense of time because your relationship with the mystery is pure. And, in the end of the day, who cares if anyone sees you as an “artist;” who cares if you see yourself as an “artist.” All that matters is that you enter that sacred studio place and open yourself to the mystery and say, “Let’s dance.”

Go here to get my latest book, The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, Seeker, Learner, Leader, Creator…You.

Or, go here for hard copies and Kindle (Amazon)

Filed under: Art, Creativity, Power, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: art, identity, power, self knowledge | 5 Comments »

Die To The Past

Posted on January 21, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

683. 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, Diane and I talked at length about dying to our pasts. She shared a potent meditation image – looking from her grave and in death no longer being invested in the limitations and attachments that previously confined her life. Her fears no longer mattered. She let go of her past and in so doing opened the way for growth and a new relationship with her future.

In story cycles, a character must leave behind all that they know in order to step into unknown territories. It is the movement away from the known, the comfortable, and the safe that is the metaphoric threshold to adventure and transformation. Leaving behind what you know is “story language” for dying to your past. Frodo will always return to the Shire but he will be a greatly changed. The Frodo that leaves on the adventure is not the same Frodo that returns. He knows too much about middle earth and himself to resume his former identity.

The caterpillar’s body does heroic battle resisting the cell replication that will eventually bring re-formation to a new way of being called butterfly. The caterpillar’s body reads the sweeping tide of change as cancer and fights back. This classic struggle within the caterpillar’s body of change meeting the conservative impulse ends when the resistance ends; the caterpillar can fight no more and surrenders the struggle. The imperative for change overwhelms the old identity; the caterpillar’s body releases the known and collapses into mush. Only then can the new form materialize and the new form is beyond the caterpillars capacity to imagine.

Diane’s meditation, Frodo’s journey, and the caterpillar’s process of transformation are the same metaphoric image. Each had to die to the past to step into the possible. The lesson over and over again, whether in story cycles, nature or human transformation, is that the new identity will always be greater than our wildest dreams. The only requirement is that we surrender the struggle, leave behind all that we know, experience the little death, and take a step.

Filed under: Metaphor, Transcendence, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: adventure, change, death, die, future, identity, past, story, transformation | Leave a comment »

Truly Powerful People (450)

Posted on June 2, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

450.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

For years the question I have most dreaded is the cocktail party standard, “So, what do you do?” I’ve never had a simple answer. I’ve never had a single answer. And usually, my answer serves to complicate rather than simplify. Once I stopped feeling bad that I didn’t have a simple answer, once I recognized that I was never going to have a suitable answer, I decided to make the moment an opportunity for play: I used the untenable question to sort my encounters into “those people I want to know” and “those people that I do not.” I went on offense. Without hesitation I tell them whatever comes into my mind; the people that step toward the chaos go into the “people I want to know” bucket. Those that flee the chaos have self selected themselves from my future friend pool. Recently, my newest favorite friend took me to lunch and started our time together with, “Who the hell are you?” It’s worth noting that he also has no simple answer to the dreaded question.

Once, at a conference for doctors, I performed a piece that was written to seem autobiographical, but was fiction through and through. I played the role of a doctor. Off the stage, I was surprised and delighted when people called me doctor! They didn’t realize that I was an invention – and I did nothing to help correct their perception. It felt good fitting into an identifiable box. “Doctor Robinson,” they said, “Thank you for telling us your story.” I smiled and said, “Thank you for listening to my story.” All the while I was thinking, “Mom would be so proud!” For one glorious day through my invention I felt the simple joy of being identifiable to others. And, in that day, I realized with relish that it is all an invention. None of us is truly identifiable; no one is the role that they play. Double liberation!

There is an exercise I love doing with groups: pretend that your memory will be erased in 5 minutes; before your memory is gone, before 5 minutes elapse, write all that you want to remember, all that you think you value, all that you want to recall about yourself. People write about their families and relationships, they write phone numbers of important friends, they write of their dogs and their desires. I’ve done this exercise with groups hundreds of times and once, only once, at a retreat, a woman wrote that she loved herself beyond measure, that she was fulfilled and talented and caring. When I asked her about it she said, “If I have a clean slate and can only know myself through what I’ve written, why not tell myself a great story. Why not invent an amazing me.”

Filed under: Awakening, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: identity, role | 3 Comments »

« Previous Page