Are you an Artist or a Maker?

I tend to think of myself as a "maker," because "artist" carries a lot of baggage around what people assume an "artist" to be. This is as true for artists as for non-artists.

(Point of order: Not everyone makes "art" or "fine art," or even "arts and crafts," but everyone has creativity as their human birthright. We are all creative in little ways, and in other ways, even if we do not "make art.")

Although I can call myself an Artist, because I have made "fine art" that has hung in galleries and walls in homes, and I do practice several artforms and art skillsets that are recognized as being "fine art," including music composition, poetry, painting, photography, multimedia, and so on, I tend to prefer to use "Maker" because it's a more neutral term. I make stuff. Some of it is art, some of it is just stuff that a creator makes, or a gadget engineer, or an artist making a sketch.

A lot of the baggage that "Artist" carries is cultural stereotypes and hoary romanticized clichés: you have to suffer for your art; artists are lonely, tortured souls who alone in starving squalor; artists are inherently disorganized and incapable of managing their lives; artists are depressed or suicidal drunks; and so on. Note how many clichés about artists are negative rather than positive: that's the cultural narrative since the early Romantic poets, and it's a narrative that's never been more than 25 percent true. For one thing, if artists really were that tortured and depressed all the time, they'd never actually have the energy to make their art.

Even the associated cultural narrative of "the artist's heroic struggle against the world dragging you down, to produce your masterpiece" is more myth than fact; because even artists like myself, who work more from intuition rather than intellect, still make art as a daily prctice, as a mode or way of being. Part of making things is just to make them, every day, as an ordinary activity. Like going to do your job.

For me, making art is a very positive thing, not a negative thing. It's not work I have to force myself to do, or fight to achieve. Making art is as necessary, and as easy, as breathing. It's not a heroic struggle, not even when I'm struggling against physical ailment or depression. You can view making art as therapeutically balancing or expressing life's many problems (glass half empty), or you can view it as transcending and overcoming life's many problems (glass half full). The truth is, making art is what you do, whether you're having a bad month or a good one; you just keep making art, no matter what. It can be your everyday salvation, it can give you reason to go on living, it can be the routine, the one constant in your life while everything else is falling apart.

Ironically, even though there are many "positive thinkers" out there who probably think I'm negativity personified (probably because I reject their simplistic aphorisms in favor of more nuanced and realistic overviews), in truth I'm very optimistic and positive about the benefits of expanding creativity in one's life to the utmost. I do think it's good that we all make art of some kind, even if no one but you ever sees it or knows you do it. The purpose of making a painting isn't to become a famous painter, it's just to make a painting; fame is often quite accidental, and capricious. And fickle. I make a lot of sketches and other little things that no one ever sees; they're not good enough to share, period. (The only reason you'll ever see early drafts or sketch versions is because I'm interested in the creative process for its own sake, and I sometimes like to examine a piece from inception to completion to see what happens during the process.)

For my recent art installation, "The Temple of Deep Time" (one of ten corn crib installations at Silverwood County Park), I had an overall conception, an early and immediate vision that I had when I first visited Silverwood, and saw the spiral tree rounds and the corn cribs there, and the end result was in fact very close to the original vision, and written proposal. And in order to get to completion, I had to use almost all of my skills as a creative person (the use of combinations of which is the very definition of "multimedia"), including: graphic design, computer work, photography, drawing, carpentry, math skills, a little bit of programming (in collaboration), getting up on ladders and doing construction, weaving, lighting design, electrical wiring, laser and solar technology, research into weather and solar annual variations, music composition, recording studio production skills, illustration, typography, paper arts, woodworking, calligraphy, and more. Even with this list, I've probably left something out.

So all of that went into making this art installation. And I did it all in about six or seven weeks, from inception to completion. (With a few details added later.) and last night I spent several hours doing long-exposure night photography (which I have taught) and HD video, to document the night-time aspects of my art installation, The Temple of Deep Time. The piece is about time, in multiple ways, on several layers, from past to future. Every element and aspect of the piece is a meditation on time, in some way. That is why I included a laser light show, and a music playback system: music is a timebound art, it has duration, then it ends. Music is an artform you cannot experience without time. It's only appropriate that it both in or porters time-bound arts as part of its design, and also requires being documented over time, using time-shifting as well as time-bound technologies. I will at some point do a time-lapse video of the installation, as well.

To make this art installation I used many skills beyond those (assumed to be) reserved for fine art. In truth, I don't draw a strong distinction between making things and making art.

All of this is why Maker seems to suit what I do better than Artist. If we must have labels or titles or categories. Honestly, labels and categories are for theory, which serves to describe what has been made. But I don't think about any of this when I'm making. I just Make.

Reconciling Beginner's and Expert's Mind

How do you reconcile the awareness that you don't want to spend any more time repeating kindergarten-level lessons with the truth that beginner's mind is necessary to be open, both in art-making and in life? How do you solve the paradox of wanting to work on the graduate level, rather than the freshmen level, in future spiritual and personal growth studies, with the truth that "you must become as little children to enter the Kingdom of Heaven"?

It's interesting when you find you no longer want to repeat the basic lessons over and over again. Not because there isn't anything more to learn from them, but because the repetition keeps you from moving forward. Recycling the known will never lead you to the unknown.

Sometimes you have to stand away from the fray and realize that most people don't want to go beyond repeating the known lessons. The unknown is truly more terrifying to them.

How much of the refusal to take the leap is based in fear? Fear of the unknown; fear of possible dangers or consequences; fear of failure; occasionally, fear of success.

I know that I prefer beginner's mind to expert's mind; although in truth making a negative value judgment about expert's mind is a symptom of expert's mind. Judgmentalism comes pretty much always from expert's mind. Beginner's mind is more likely to, literally, keep an open mind, and wait and see what happens. What happens if we do this? Cool!

Perhaps it's possible to enfold expert's mind within beginner's mind by acknowledging, without puffing oneself up, where one's strengths do in fact lie. That there are some lessons you really don't need to repeat anymore, because you really have learned what you needed to from them. And that there are still other lessons that you're still learning from, and needing to repeat. And that there are some skills you really do have under your belt, now; you will continue to practice them, although you don't need to keep rebuilding them from the foundation up, because you've now done that.

Perhaps, then, it's possible to say, over here, lesson learned and can move on to graduate level rather than freshman level; and over there, it might be good to take intermediate level one more time. It's not as if there's a test required to matriculate.

A couple of years ago, I remember sitting on my porch having a conversation with an old friend. Both of us have studied many kinds of spiritual and healing and artistic pursuits; between us we've been certified in numerous bodywork and energywork modalities; we've taken a long road together, done many of the same seminars and study groups, walked many of the same paths, met many of the same teachers. Even so, we're not always in congruence: individual needs make for individual emphases, here and there, and relatively greater or lesser individual strengths.

We sat on the porch that evening, after dinner, discussing a lot of the self-development work we'd experienced. All of the above. We came to say, each separately but at about the same time, that we were tired of repeating beginning-level workshops anymore, and wanted to pursue something more advanced. Not there was nothing to learn anymore from the beginning-level workshops—although in some instances this was rather more true than for others—but that we both sense time is growing shorter.

When you reach the point in your life when you realize that, barring accidental death or sudden fatal illness, you have passed the probably midway point of your alloted span, it becomes a matter of wanting to be efficient with one's time. There's less to be idle, less time to waste. Sometimes late-life illnesses enforce unplanned idleness. Then what do you do with your enforced free time? If there isn't some kind of hit on your ability to think clearly, caused by either your illness or your meds, it gives you time to think, time to create. Every wasted day seems lost, when you find yourself unable to do much. But even these can be used, for something.

So perhaps one way to encompass expert's mind within beginner's mind is to admit that maybe you do not need to keep repeating the same lessons, purely on the grounds of wanting to maximize your time and effort. Can one be efficient with one's spiritual and creative practice? I think so. You do it by removing clutter, minimizing distractions, maximizing focus, "working smarter rather than harder," and similar attitudes. You stop wasting time on things that you don't need to waste time on; things that are not essential and required for whatever form your practice takes. You shift that freed up time over towards activities that enhance your process rather than take away from it.

These can be really simple, small, pragmatic things, like finding a time-saving way to work. Or they can be turning otherwise unfocused time into focused time. So, an artist might find a time-saving way to wash her brushes; or she might turn washing her brushes into a meditative practice. Both are valid shifts of attention and consciousness towards something more fulfilling and useful.

Another way to reconcile beginner's and expert's mind is to think from up a level, from the symbolic rather than the literal level. When you start to look at your life from the symbolic level, it becomes possible to spot patterns and habits, and then consciously choose which to keep, and which to winnow out. Thinking from the symbolic level requires the ability to step back and be relatively objective about your own life and practice, and to take things less personally. Thinking symbolically means being honest enough with ourselves to both acknowledge limiting faults and acknowledge effective strengths. Mostly we only focus on our past failures; that's a habit worth winnowing. Thinking symbolically means looking at the transpersonal story, not just the personal drama; it means letting go of what's right in front of your nose so that you can see what's down at the end of the street. it's a shift of attention. And it can be a path towards finding the universal within the particular.

I've said more or less the same thing from several difficult angles, now. I've tried to rephrase it several times. I've repeated this lesson a few times, now, with slightly different words each time. It's way of spiraling around the topic till we can find a place to land.

The point is, once you get a skillset down, you need to keep practicing it, to keep it well-honed, but you don't need to be keep repeating the introductory class about it. It doesn't mean you have become an expert; it does mean you're no longer a neophyte. You're somewhere between.

So one final way to reconcile beginner's mind with expert's mind is to realize that expert's mind is a forever-retreating goal that you will never achieve. It's something we keep practicing, to keep those skills honed, all the while knowing there is always more to learn, more to discover, and more to practice.

Beginner's mind is an attitude towards learning: the open and absorbing mind, that sees what's really there, rather than what we assume or think is there. The idea that we think we don't need to learn anymore is expert's mind. So, we can find a middle point, between total ignorance and total expertise, and know that's where we spend most of our time, anyway. So just do it.