Without A Map – Zen and the Art of Making Art

In my last article, I explored how it can be hard for artists to summon the guts to give to ourselves the same label – drummer, painter, sculptor – that we give to our heroes.  “How can I possibly share that identity?” we wonder to ourselves, “What have I done to deserve to?”  And yet, I suggested, it’s important for budding artists to do just that — to think of themselves, and to call themselves what they’ve dreamed of becoming.  Why?  Because almost everyone possesses some level of fear about pursuing their dreams.  And that fear, when we allow it to grow, can stifle our creative output, or even cause us to give up and stop creating altogether.  We think we can never measure up, and so we resist setting expectations for ourselves.  The sooner we join our mentors under the same title, and the sooner we take ownership of the identity of what we dream of becoming, the sooner we can get on to the important business of achieving our creative goals.

But just how do we get on with the business of achieving our creative goals?  After we’ve summoned the guts to refer to ourselves as real artists, then what?

It’s common for young artists to believe that at some perfectly ripe time in the future, if they practice enough, read enough books on technique, and talk to the right people, they will arrive.  Consciously or not, they think that one day they’ll wake up with all the tools they need to consistently create legitimate art with ease.  “This,” they imagine, “will be my transition from amateur to pro, and finally I’ll be able to show my work to the world without hesitation.”

Encouraged by schools and universities that promote this notion of arrival, millions of artists pursue their creative goals through formal education, some going so far as earning a formal degree.  Within the world of music, this is particularly true of classical players.  But in the last 20 years, pop and jazz musicians have increasingly sought college degrees.  In the United States alone, schools like Berklee College of Music in Boston, and dozens of music technical colleges across the country, cater to players who want to make a career of contemporary music.

Those of us who have had great teachers know how powerful the lessons of experience can be.  Teachers help us leap ahead much faster than we could on our own.  A great teacher sees our potential, then ignites it by illuminating things that would have taken years to figure out for ourselves, if ever.

But teachers and schools, no matter how good, can’t endow us with the most important skill we need as practicing artists, which is always to maintain, in spite of everything we know, the adventurous curiosity of an amateur.

The truth is that ‘arrival’ for artists, no matter how appealing, is a chimaera.  Arrival doesn’t exist.  It’s an imaginary oasis in the desert of every artist’s lifelong struggle to create interesting things out of the same grains of sand that surround us all.  For sure, teachers and experience will make an artist better and give her skills that make her process easier.  But great artists understand that no amount of learning will, by itself, enable them to graduate to an enlightened realm of consistently good art-making.  Not only are great artists not dependent on a belief that they have arrived, they thrive, consciously or not, on their conviction that they haven’t.  For great artists, it’s all about the quest.  Great artists are children on a treasure hunt without a map, following their gut in the moment, hoping against all odds to unearth something valuable.  Great artists are forever curious amateurs who have submitted to the urge to create, or who can’t help but create, knowing how painstaking the process can be.

Artists Make Art

About a year ago, I heard this definition of an artist: “An artist is someone who makes art.”

Seems pretty self-evident, no?  But what this definition implies is that artists are constantly working on something, either because they can’t help themselves, or because they’ve found a way to overcome all of the practical and psychological obstacles to getting down to work.

I like this definition because it abandons the notion of arrival altogether.  It acknowledges that legitimate art can be created by anyone, at any technical level, with any amount of formal training, famous or not.  I like this definition, too, because it emphasizes something that I believe to be true: that the thing that matters most for artists in the pursuit of their goals is simply the making of art.

The Zen of Amateurs

That successful artists are simply those who manage to make art on a regular basis isn’t some flakey, new age idea.  It can be seen again and again in practice.

The life stories of famous artists that reveal people for whom creating art was simply part of their everyday lives, and for whom success was almost accidental, are ubiquitous.

Joni Mitchell, the 70s folk/rock icon, grew up with dreams of being a professional painter.  For her, music was just a fun hobby when she skyrocketed to songwriting-stardom in her early 20s.  Rod Stewart was working hard at becoming a professional soccer player when he was wooed away by the excitement of the 1960s London music scene.  Bruce Hornsby, the 80s piano-pop songwriter and keyboardist for the Grateful Dead wanted to become an NBA basketball star before giving into his love of music.  Charles Ives, the great American composer, was a successful insurance salesman by day, and wrote all of his masterpieces after 5pm, solely for the enjoyment of it.  Franz Kafka, the great German author, also an insurance man by day, escaped to his writing every evening.  The revolutionary 80s band, The Talking Heads, was composed not of experienced musicians, but of a crew of experimentally-minded art school friends. N*E*R*D, the rap/rock group formed “just for fun” by the famous hip-hop production duo, the Neptunes (and who I drum for), has achieved a level of success the founders never anticipated.

The list of musicians and artists for whom success came, not because they believed they’d arrived and were finally ready to present themselves to the world, but simply as the byproduct of making art for the fun of it, is long.  I’ve witnessed it repeatedly in my own life among artists.  My own band, The Hopefuls, was formed as a playful side project.  But almost as soon as our first record was released, the group because one of the Midwest’s most popular bands.

Fun hobbies have a way of becoming our greatest artistic expressions.  It makes sense when you think about it.  When we do something without self-consciousness and ego, and simply because doing it makes us feel complete, our soul and spirit are clearly reflected far more clearly.  The difference is palpable.  People respond to it and ask us for more.

In this way, great artists are like Zen masters.  In both cases, there is a strong sense of being in the moment: of the rawness, the complexity and unfinished-ness that is the present, not a polished perfection that is an ultimate arrival.

For sure, unlike Zen masters, great artists are often consumed by attachments to things and people in this world.  Yet, their mutual reliance on the moment to feed their souls, to learn lessons, and to tell stories, suggests that there may be other parallels between the disciplines of Zen and art.

There are.  One is that Buddhism acknowledges life’s contradictions, and artists must, too.  The day-to-day work of artists happens within a paradoxical mindset.  On the one hand, their work is driven by an insatiable desire to arrive, to form a concise creative message, to be the best, to create the perfect work.  Yet while artists feel moments of intense satisfaction, that sustained sense of arrival rarely comes.  Because once an artist (who makes art) senses that arrival, she habitually moves on to another treasure hunt.

Successful artists, by and large, tend to agree with Zen Buddhists that life is a long road, filled with ups and downs, and that the truest path to happiness is by approaching it with no singular definition of success, no one sense of what it means to arrive, no treasure map. Reality is too shrewd for our premeditated ambitions.  Far better, I think, is to live as curious amateurs, taking life’s surprises for granted, and turning them into art.

Follow Eric on Twitter @ericfawett