Fearless Art

“As long as the painting is entirely about my success/failure, there’s no freedom to meet the challenge of creating. The environment needed is one of no measurement, no rewards, no comparisons, no failure or success, no striving or accomplishment – only permission to become a pioneer in your own creative wilderness. Then the painting process can become a deeply satisfying practice, and a profound connection can be made. The ‘me’ and the effort that maintains it are absent when there is absolute absorption in the process of creating.” –Stewart Cubley Art and the Challenge of Change, published in Perspective:Journal of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, February/March 2004

Process Arts Basics

By Stewart Cubley

1. Art is not something to learn or get better at. It’s about being. The act of creation is a point of contact with your essential self. The artifacts of the journey are not the journey. The process is the goal.

2. Expectation kills wildness. When you expect something specific you identify with the outcome, unable to detach the painting from your own success or failure. When there is no goal, the “me” and the efforts to maintain it are absent.

3. Resistance is a friend, not a failing. It has a gift you can learn to trust through exploration. Even daring to paint an “unacceptable” painting can be a beginning.

4. Daring is discovering. By dropping inhibitions you get to experience the places you fear but secretly want to go. For example, you might panic when your painting looks too chaotic, too busy. You want to draw it together using a unifying theme or color. Or you want to simplify it. Instead, try making it more chaotic. Then you may suddenly enter into a powerful stream of energy and be swept by a current beyond self-judgment.

5. Not-knowing has power. When you look around the room at the paintings, you sometimes feel that everybody else is doing great except yourself. To not-know means to accept your own voice, your own images, your own colors. Not-knowing is the force that allows you to transcend the rules, to go beyond who you thought you were, to allow your wildness to be born.

6. Meaning is mystery. The power of the painting cannot be captured by explanation. Its magic lies in the undefined, beyond label or concept. The real meaning of the painting unfolds through the experience – palpable and close, yet ever unnamable.

7. Completing a painting is being complete with yourself. It’s an inner state of freedom and release in which there is no running away from and no holding onto. Each painting has a destination that’s not of your own making. To follow the journey through to the end is both an ending and a beginning.

Explore the power and potential of your own creative spirit!