“Feelings are guides not gods.” – Dr. Bob Hoke
When I was in art school – and shortly after graduating – I tried wood sculpture, metal sculpture and pottery. I had a “story” of myself as a 3D sculptor. I soon noticed in each of those artistic disciplines that there were times where I was less than enthusiastic about my work. I didn’t “feel like working at it” and I was focusing on and treating this feeling of “I don’t wanna” as if it were a deity to be worshiped/obeyed/disobeyed. At the time I thought I had to “fix my attitude”, force myself to continue, and I struggled with it. I talked to Bob about this issue during one of our many lunches * and he said the quote mentioned above and told me something similar to the following story (which is excerpted from a book I’m now working on titled “The Artist and the Psychiatrist”):
So I examined my feelings (lived with the question a while) by keeping notes in my journal/sketchbook over the next month: I noticed that I loved to design the sculptures on paper and I loved the design process. I even loved the end result of the created sculpture, what I did not love was the process of creating the sculpture; the sawdust, splinters, sparks, the weight of the welding mask on my head and the fumes from pottery glazes and kilns/ovens. Those were the things I “didn’t wanna” deal with and would avoid by thinking of “other things to actually do” besides what needed to be done to finish the project. Turned out that my overall stick-to-it-and-persist attitude was just fine – all I needed to do was remove the media-elements that I so strongly disliked, that I had temporarily allowed to rule my desire to create. My feelings thus guided me to my present art media preference – cut paper collage. Which is not sculpture, nor the story of myself as a creator of really large 3D works, but turns out to “fit” the real me best. With my cut paper medium I still enjoy designing something in the dimensional sense: figuring out what physical piece connects to what, which layers over what. I love the end fine art product – for examples see www.sueclancy.com – and now I love the process of creating too because there are no splinters, sparks or fumes! The most I risk is a paper cut, or a glue-y mess – and all of those things I can live happily with!
*See also the result of these lunch-time meetings- the ebook: “Dr. Bob’s Emotional Repair Program – First Aid Kit” http://my.bookbaby.com/book/dr-bobs-emotional-repair-program-first-aid-kit