transposing Werner

I wondered what it would be like to read Werner's four steps as applying to painting rather than music...

We have talked a lot about the impurities of your purpose, your work, and your approaches. Now we are going to look at a method of deprogramming and reprogramming. There are four steps in making this change in your life.

Step One introduces you to the inner self. It is a kind of meditation, a sharp contrast to the space people usually draw or paint from. As previously stated, many have experienced this state from activities like riding a bicycle, running or swimming, meditating and chanting, various martial arts and ancient tea ceremonies. Zen and yogic traditions are drenched in the awareness of this space. I've met artists who have studied other disciplines and have attained the fruits of those disciplines, but could not retain the awareness while painting. It is just a matter of touching your materials in that state, but they could never do that because they missed one little point: you must surrender the need to make a good painting. Otherwise you can't really let go!. Simple, but not easy! Learn a way of attaining inner balance and approach your materials in that space.

The first two steps will help you observe all the thoughts and pressures connected with your materials. You will learn to let go and love whatever you see coming out. This is absolutely necessary to escape your dilemma. You can't fake it! Step One will help you get in touch with your intuitive self by bypassing the conscious mind, the epitome of all limited drawing and painting. Physically, you will intuitively move towards the most effortless and efficient way of using your particular materials. Daily practice will allow you to become familiar with the more effortless movements, or perfect pencil grip, delicate lines, or whatever. You will gravitate to the physical position that allows you to draw or paint without leaving the space.

Step Two is the retention of that awareness while the hands explore your materials in a free improvisation. I don't mean the style of abstract art, but the intent. Your hands are free to wander, without your conscious participation. Again, this is only possible if you can release the need to make something good for a few moments.

If Step One and Two are analogous to crawling, Step Three is beginning to walk. In Step Three you will learn how to do simple things from this consciousness. The natural space you developed forms a foundation from which you relearn how to work. In this step, forms, colours and shapes begin to appear through you in intelligent form. You start to experience what wants to be drawn, and what you can comfortably draw. You learn to stay within yourself and not be seduced by your ego. Just as the space established your natural connection to your materials and the marks you made, it now establishes what can be made effortlessly with line, paint, collage or whatever. But it will also be the start of becoming real, and your work will be built on more solid ground. Leaving the ego out of painting will remove the drama of trying to paint what you wish you could paint. You will be practicing the wisdom of accepting, with love, what you can paint from the space.

The space itself is the teacher, and life becomes centred around learning to connect with the space. Drawing and painting become secondary. You remember past works not in terms of how well you painted, but by how much you let go. Those are usually the best paintings anyway, but now the priority has changed. You're no longer bothered by what is out there, but absorbed by what is here.

You're not condemned to your present level of working for life, however, because in Step Four you begin a process of change and growth. Built on the solid foundation of the first few steps, with detachment and calm, and with self-love, you begin trying things that can't be done effortlessly. Not only do you work from the space, but you don't assume you've mastered anything until it produces itself from that space.  Step Four will help you acquire a taste for absorption into a subject, rather than skimming uselessly over many subjects. The discipline of patience overtakes you as you wait in a detached way for mastery to occur in what you are doing. Every practice session becomes a link in a chain, a patient process that moves you towards your goal.

losing Werner's space

Some months ago, having been writing about blocks to painting and drawing for some time, I made a comment about not even being able to begin on the problems/blocks I had with music. At that time I wasn't playing at all, having another try at stopping for a while to try to let the physical problems with my hand resolve themselves.

Now, playing within my limits, caring much less, music is always easy. Not only easy, but instantly, experientially, satisfying. Today I found myself thinking that painting can't ever be like this, because it isn't about the instance of experience in the same way; music is the moment, a being in the moment. When you put down your instrument there's no painting, no trace. Whereas with painting, however much you try to just go with the process, just be in the experience of putting on colour or making line, there's always some part of you feeling your way towards 'a painting', a product; a coming together of line and colour in away that's meaningful to you in that final object.

But I suspect I'm deeply wrong here. I don't know why it's easier for me to drop into the experience of music in a second, to feel the music connect itself up all the way through my body as easily as taking a breath. Whatever was stopping this from happening all those years of trying and striving and being self-conscious with music seems likely to be working in some similar way in relation to painting.

I think I did start out this period of painting, this last couple of years, like that. That was how I was able to start again after the long freeze - by allowing myself to simply be captivated by the flooding of deep yellow through water into blue. Basic elements of colour and material, no thought, no intention. So what's different now? Why is it no longer satisfying just to play with colour? Or, is it that I don't do it enough, and as a result all those intentions and ideas about paintings start to populate my mind and body, moving into a space that, if I'm doing it,  just quietly empties out until all such ideas have silently drained away....

four steps

Kenny Werner spends the first half of his book introducing his reader to the idea that the mind, in particular 'the obsessive need to sound good', creates a tension in playing music which almost all musicians experience. He draws attention to the fact that most people play much better when it doesn't matter - playing with friends rather than performing, or playing alone. It isn't just the mind, conscious thoughts, which cause the problem, but the feeling of fear behind any thoughts which arise - the fear of sounding bad, which he suggests is tied up with the connection between a sense of self-worth and 'playing well'.

In the second half of the book, he starts to discuss practical strategies for overcoming this.

...We have talked a lot about the impurities of your purpose, your playing, and your practicing. Now we are going to look at a method of deprogramming and reprogramming. There are four steps in making this change in your life.

Step One introduces you to the inner self. It is a kind of meditation, a sharp contrast to the space people usually play in. As previously stated, many have experienced this state from activities like riding a bicycle, running or swimming, meditating and chanting, various martial arts and ancient tea ceremonies. Zen and yogic traditions are drenched in the awareness of this space. I've met musicians who have studied other disciplines and have attained the fruits of those disciplines, but could not retain the awareness while playing. It is just a matter of touching your instrument in that state, but they could never do that because they missed one little point: you must surrender the need to sound good. Otherwise you can't really let go!. Simple, but not easy! Learn a way of attaining inner balance and approach your instrument in that space.

The first two steps will help you observe all the thoughts and pressures connected with your instrument. You will learn to let go and love whatever you hear coming out. This is absolutely necessary to escape your dilemma. You can't fake it! Step One will help you get in touch with your intuitive self by bypassing the conscious mind, the epitome of all limited playing. Physically, you will intuitively move towards the most effortless and efficient way of playing your particular instrument. Daily practice will allow you to become familiar with the more effortless stance, or perfect embouchure, head position, or whatever. You will gravitate to the physical position that allows you to play without leaving the space.

Step Two is the retention of that awareness while the hands explore the instrument in a free improvisation. I don't mean the style of free jazz, but the intent. Your hands are free to wander, without your conscious participation. Again, this is only possible if you can release the need to sound good for a few moments.

If Step One and Two are analogous to crawling, Step Three is beginning to walk. In Step Three you will learn how to do simple things from this consciousness. The natural space you developed forms a foundation from which you relearn how to play. In this step, music begins to play through you in intelligent form. You start to experience what wants to be played, and what you can comfortably play. You learn to stay within yourself and not be seduced by your ego. Just as the space established your natural connection to your instrument and sound, it now establishes what can be played effortlessly over form, time, changes, written music or whatever. But it will also be the start of becoming real, and your playing will be built on more solid ground. Leaving the ego out of playing will remove the drama of trying to play what you wish you could play. You will be practicing the wisdom of accepting, with love, what you can play from the space.

The space itself is the teacher, and life becomes centred around learning to connect with the space. Music becomes secondary. You remember gigs not by how well you played, but by how much you let go. Those are usually the best gigs anyway, but now the priority has changed. You're no longer bothered by what is out there, but absorbed by what is here.

You're not condemned to your present level of playing for life, however, because in Step Four you begin a process of change and growth. Built on the solid foundation of the first few steps, with detachment and calm, and with self-love, you begin practicing things that can't be played effortlessly. Not only do you practice from the space, but you don't assume you've mastered anything until it plays itself from that space.  Step Four will help you acquire a taste for absorption into a subject, rather than skimming uselessly over many subjects. The discipline of patience overtakes you as you wait in a detached way for mastery to occur on what you are practicing. Every practice session becomes a link in a chain, a patient process that moves you towards your goal.

These steps can be life-transforming. You'll feel as free as a bird when you play, yet have great discipline in all your studies. If patiently followed, these four steps will transform your practice and performance (131-133).

It's not just a theory. This has started to happen to me, to a small extent, though as a natural process, rather than by trying to implement his steps.  I was probably influenced more than I know by Indirect Procedures, a book  on playing and practising by an Alexander teacher. He points out that when you play from a completely relaxed space, within your natural limits, you don't get injuries. And this is true for me too. I had playing injuries for years, which recurred even after long breaks. Now that I play more quietly within my limits, the playing is softer, more nuanced, easy, and there are no injuries.

cash converters

Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way talks about people who come together as 'blocked creatives' going on to become film directors, novelists etc. We have no such lofty plans in our group, but here is a poem written by one of our members, who had never written poetry before we got together (this is her second). Hearing her read it was quite something.

 

Cash Converters

A Friday payday siren pierces the air and the iron gates yawn

First a two line trickle then a torrent.

I smell burning steel, mixed with caulking tar and earth dirt.

Towers of men, faces streaked, clothes pockmarked, bodies

bent forward in desperation, gasp their way out.

There’s too many of them.

I take in the gate; the lamp post, the sign. I am standing where he said I should

He cannot have forgotten the plan?

I search all the faces, my eyes racing from one to the other.

Willing a spark of knowing to ignite.

I wait a long time.

A trickle again, then nothing but the lingering smells.

I have failed. He on the other hand will have slipped in to

Betty McGhee’s, or the Seven Seas.

Before long he will be sailing on the crest of whisky and camaraderie

Who could blame him? – I did

A blast of light and laughter falls on the pavements outside.

I peep in every time the door opens. No one asks me what I want

I have no courage to enter but turning, walk home

Empty handed, rehearsing the story I have to tell,

Planning ways of dealing with their disappointment.

She plays out the same ritual each week.

Light a big fire, make the room warm, keep TV money for when he arrives

Friday’s injunctions-Do not upset him, keep quiet, let him lie on the couch

Leave the bread for him

Keep him happy.

Who could blame her? – I did

Saturday sounds of children, women, chatting across garden fences

Next door’s TV.

Willing her to find another way, I hunch over school jotters

Shutting out my body from her.

‘Just this last time’, I cannot refuse.

Her family name is The Chancellor, this aunt who always has

Blue Riband Biscuits cradled in tins on the top shelf

Whose daughters are well dressed, ‘Just new for Easter’ they say

A sigh, a downward look, a reprimand for bothering her and

‘What is it this time’? hangs in the air. ‘Just five shillings would do’

Reaching into my pocket I exchange the Child Allowance book for the coins.

I hear but don’t hear the litany ‘drunk, useless, do you think I’m made of money’

Cousin Anne wants to show me her new clothes

She pirouettes and laughs

The Chancellor looks on. The Blue Riband biscuits remain in the tin

Who could blame her? – I did

It was fun sometimes cooking on the fire. It did take longer

But then we were not going anywhere.

Trouble was studying by candlelight made my eyes hurt

But it would soon be summer and then no need to pretend.

It was only white lies I told.

Who could blame me? - I did

The shame was worse than the hunger

No one at my school would understand. They must never find out.

Proper school uniform. Collar and cuffs of white starched linen

Mine made of paper pinched from the art class

Nuns, whose life’s work was to remind me of all my sins

Who could blame them? – I did

The sign was unmistakeable, Medici’s glinting gold coins

In contrast to the dark cubicle and the worn wooden floor

Musty smells of clothes and the ticking of clocks.

Eyes straight ahead, tip toes to look taller

It’s two days after Christmas.

Would it have made any difference had I known then that

Queen Isabella had been here before me?

No it would not have made it easier to part with the Timex watch

With the real leather strap.

‘It’s not really worth much’, he said.

I could proclaim-‘Look what I got for Christmas’

I could roll up my sleeve so that it could be seen out of the corner of my eye

I could go on thanking her for such a great gift

Could he not see it was worth more than Spanish jewels

‘I’ll give you two and six pence’

Who could blame him? - I did

I got better at it. Haggling that is.

It was easier when it was his suit that I handed over

Or her rings. They, would be needed again –

A suit for Sunday and rings on her finger to prove that she was really not that poor

Redemption was more than a religious idea.

When she died –too young, I found them –at the back of the kitchen drawer

Years’ worth of pledge tickets marking all the treasures that had never been redeemed

Old envelopes covered with her curly fives and calculations, letters red stamped with ‘Urgent’ demanding payment, threats of eviction.

And a missal, with a well thumbed prayer to St Jude-saint of desperation.

And again I saw her familiar figure at the table,

working out how far this week’s money would go and if Peter could stand being robbed just one more time.

And I heard her say. ‘Nellie, Just wait till you have a good job

Everything will be fine. You’ll take care of us.

Who could blame her- I don’t.

wax

WAX

When I see you and how you are,

I close my eyes to the other.

For your Solomon's seal I become wax

throughout my body. I wait to be light.

I give up opinions on all matters.

I become the reed flute for your breath.

You were inside my hand.

I kept reaching around for something.

I was inside your hand, but I kept asking questions

of those who know very little.

I must have been incredibly simple or drunk or insane

to sneak into my own house and steal money,

to climb over the fence and  take my own vegetables.

But no more. I've gotten free of that ignorant fist

that was pinching and twisting my secret self.

The universe and the light of the stars come through me.

I am the crescent moon put up

over the gate to the festival.

Jelaluddin Rumi

How would you read this if you didn't believe in a god, and if you found the word  'spirituality' quite meaningless?

How would it relate to creativity?

every step a stumble

I was mixing up paint in an old saucer this morning. The first thing I noticed was that, as usual, at some point I had started humming to myself, which seems to happen completely unconsciously and within about five minutes of any sort of paint-related activity. Then I began to notice the edge of a thought, creeping out of the murk as I fixed my attention on the mixing. I can't completely grasp it. But it's something about the history of your life in relation to the capacity to re-start a particular form of creative work after a very long gap (in my case, about 25 years).

Each tiny step that I make in the direction of actually painting - actually doing something, anything, with paint, consistently, most days - is, in a weird kind of way, a denial of all the years that I decided not to do this. It doesn't mean that whatever I did in the intervening years was a mistake, or without value. But, here with a brush, or a pen, or a pencil in my hand, it suddenly hits me, with a kind of force, that I've been here before. In fact that I was here before, many, many times. And it wasn't enough. I didn't have enough oomph, enough wally (British colloquialisms - energy, conviction), to keep making the marks. I lost courage. I thought that the feeling of not knowing where I was going meant that this was not an activity that could be continued with. That I didn't have that mysterious thing that is supposed to fire artists up, creating an irresistable urge to create which cannot be resisted. I used to seriously believe that was going to happen; that one day I would be seized by that power, made, in an instant, into a channel for a flow I could feel, always just slightly out of reach.

One could get all psychological/therapeutic here. Basic lack of a sense of agency, of one's own power? Some kind of learning from experience that had fashioned a visceral, embodied belief that powers came like that out of void and threw you around in an uncontrollable way? Or perhaps I should get cultural/sociological and discuss the source of romanticised ideas about the muse, and the maddness and uncontrollability of artistic creation. But this isn't my point. My point is the effect that turning away from believing in the mark-making 25years ago is having on the capacity to re-start mark-making now. More than that, on the capacity to continue mark-making now.

I still can't make this feeling take the form of words. Is it, 'now that I begin to see that, actually, mark-making is possible for me, I feel that I have wasted 25 years when I went somewhere else'? That's not quite it, because that thought doesn't necessarily have any effect on mark-making in the present. It's as if every mark that makes it onto the paper here, now, in 2011, has to fight the realisation that these marks have been wanting to come out all of this time. That they were there, all those years ago, if only I had known how to let them out (and then I could have had an extra 25 years of mark-making??). Still not it.

Every mark now has to fight the voice that said 'What's the point?'. 'You can't make money out of this'. 'You'll never be secure if you carry on like this'. That voice won, for a long time. It won for most of my adult life. It's used to winning. And now some other voice is trying to stand up to it, to counter it, to find enough strength from somewhere to not only stand up, but to bop this long-established bully on the nose. And to keep bopping it till it gets tired and actually bops off somewhere else.

Still not completely it. I'm left with the vague sense that this activity in the present of mark-making as value seems in some way to undermine my sense of my own history, in a way I can't put my finger on. Perhaps the thought is, 'if this had value all the long, you didn't have to do all that'. Or is it, ' if this didn't have value then, why should it have value now?'. Mmmm. I think I might be moving from the second towards the first. They're all blocks to creativity, whatever way you look at it....