It was my favorite paradox-quote of the week: “The discipline is free association,” he said. Horatio was describing his daily Wordle addiction and extended it to a metaphor for deeper art processes. Horatio is a poet, a writer, a painter, a filmmaker…Like all artists, he understands the necessity of left-brain discipline: technique and function. Color theory. Story structure. Yet, the ultimate discipline, the doorway to flow, is through the right-brain and requires the exercise of letting go of the left-brain-everything-you-think-you-know.
My teachers in theatre school often said on opening night, “Now, all you need do is let go and trust your work.” Let go of listening to yourself. Let go of your internal editor. Let go of self-judgement. Let go of your need to control. Open your heart. Dance the dance without inhibition. Dance the dance with abandon.
Leave your big ole brain behind.
The discipline of free association. It is a practice with layers. Like all life-practices it has no end; it has nothing at all to do with achievement. It’s a discipline like mindfulness is a discipline (a misnomer: mindfulness should be called sense-fullness). The practice becomes a way of living.
Approaching the park she stopped suddenly. I learned early in our life together that walks with Kerri are exercises in seeing. She sees a world that is mostly invisible to me because I am most often lost in my thoughts. She allows her eyes to roam without presupposition. Now, when she stops, before she shows me her photograph, I play the game of trying to see what grabbed her attention, what captured her eye. Inevitably, I am surprised by what she shows me. Her open focus is receptive. She doesn’t predict. She doesn’t seek. She responds. She sees composition beyond what she thinks-is-there. A tree. The lake. A strip of green.
She illuminates for me the extraordinary in the ordinary.
“How did you see that?” I ask.
She shrugs and says, “I don’t know. It was right there.”
To free associate one needs first to be free of preconception. To step on the stage, having done all the work and still be able to say, “Let’s see what happens.”
Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora
read Kerri’s blogpost about THE TREE
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Filed under: Art, Creativity, KS Friday, Seeing | Tagged: abandon, artistry, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, free association, improvisation, intuition, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, left brain, let go, mindfulness, right brain, story, studio melange, the melange | 1 Comment »
The Direction of Intention 