BEGIN AGAIN 1.2 - start with what you know and notice your cravings
reflections from my creative practice re-start this week, from fumbly to flow
It might take more than one beginning to find your way when {re}starting your creative practice, no matter how long you’ve been making art or exploring your creative-expressive side.
I’m finding this to be oh-so-true this week, and have tweaked, stopped and re-started my Begin Again process a few times this week. Including switching books and supplies to work with.
Maybe what I’ve noticed in my current personal process will be helpful for some part of yours, so I’m going to share some of that below.
Or, if you just need some more practical tips to help you get your practice going, check out the last post, inspired by my process as well:
You know how sometimes you know that you’re hungry and you need to eat to feel better, but you just don’t know what you’re hungry for? Nothing sounds quite right when suggested? Even some of your favorite meals sound dull… while there’s just this craving that you can’t quite put your finger on.
This is how I’m feeling in my own efforts to re-start my art journal practice as I intended this week.
It’s been a rough start, but I’ve been tweaking things about my approach to find what best stimulates and satiates my creative appetite right now, in the midst of lots of life stress and big changes.
To begin something again, we usually start with what we know, or with what has worked or interested us before.
And that’s what I did. It’s a valid starting point to get out of our head, and into the active part of creative practice where we can really get a good read on our current internal state. It’s a bit of a warm-up to assess where we’re at with our creative energy.
So, to start my 4 week creative practice exploration, I grabbed an altered book with some pre-painted pages, a palette of some favorite watercolors, and a couple of pens I like. Keeping it simple.
I came to that set-up two days in a row, put some words down and lines, a bit of color, and… felt nothing of note. My motivation and interest was not increasing. And I noticed my creative energy was gravitating toward a crochet project to escape into instead.
Nothing wrong with that, but I’m wanting to re-start my personal art practice to move forward and explore some other things I can sense bubbling up from within my consciousness and life. These are things I can’t fully bring to words, and that crafts like crochet don’t totally express or fulfill for me.
However, I DO often feel closer to the visioning and possibility of some of my creative ideas when I’m in the trance-like, repetitious movement of crafts like crochet and sewing.
It’s such a beautiful dance how different mediums can support the realization of our creative associations and process. If one medium isn’t working for you, percolate on it while working in another.
So, after fumbling through the motions with my original intention to re-start my art journal practice, and then sitting in the soothing rhythms of double-crochet stitch rows, I was able to recognize that the ways I’ve often re-started my creative art practice in the last decade just aren’t going to work for me how they used to.
I’m not the same person, and my creative process won’t be either. This is how it’s supposed to be.
Here’s what I noticed in the process of beginning again:
The pre-painted, book-printed pages made me realize I crave blank pages right now, for the room to play with and cultivate some more wild or strange impulses with more structured notions, to see what grows from their combination.
The thought of ‘art journaling’ just made me want a fresh sketchbook instead, and maybe even some loose pages.
The same ol’ paint palette approach, and moving color randomly and intuitively as a starting place, showed me that paint is maybe not the central, supportive medium I crave right now, but perhaps an accenting element as I begin to physically percolate with my germinating ideas.
After trying out a quote on a page in my art journal this week, I realized what I really crave is more notes to self in the language of inspired, experimental marks and word-seeds, sprinkled on the page, that mean nothing to anyone but me.
What does all that really mean?
I can’t say for sure. I could try, but the words would do it no justice. Your understanding would not be entirely what I meant.
This is the intimacy of a personal creative practice. The preciousness of creative beginnings. I think of it as a connection, a communication with creative spirit that belongs only to you.
I think, for me, I know I’m getting it ‘right’ - that is, tapping into my current flow - when I don’t have the logical words for what I’m exploring or why… just that it feels right and curious and nourishing within, and that I want to return to the making process to see what happens, what comes through, what I learn, where it leads.
That’s what makes it a practice worth keeping and returning to for me - that beginner’s sense of not knowing, or un-knowing, and the thrill of aliveness that comes from allowing who we’ve become to integrate with our process of imagining change, possibility, and realization.
So, I traded what I started with this week (my prepped art journal, paint, and ways that used to work for me) for materials and a perspective that feels like a better fit in the actual process right now - a budget sketchbook, collage fodder, and curiosity about different ways of exploring and expressing my creative energy and ideas alongside life right now.
I hope you’re finding the morsels and tweaks of curiosity and motivation in your creative practice approach, too.