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Looper's Delight
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On Jul 28, 2012, at 11:35 PM, Matthias Grob wrote: and I suspect that many artists that entered history had the impression they were doing "journaling" as you call it! a very personal story can become relevant for humanity, independent of the intention… Ted K. replied off-list to my over-long story and it seems relevant (given some of these later posts) to share a bit of our exchange. He said, in part: I was saddened to read what (I think) you seemed to be saying...that you'd stopped doing the music (more-or-less) because you came to the conclusion that you were only doing it only for yourself - for your own mental health - and to you (maybe) this was somehow unworthy. ... I know full well that I do all the weird "creative" things that I do, writing, image-making, music/noise-making, entirely out of an internal need of some sort. ... But I really think the world needs every single one of its artists, musicians, writers, poets, prophets and visionaries...yes, crazy people most of them. ... Hey, Ted Thanks for your thoughtful reply! But not to worry; I agree with you completely, ... and I didn't stop my guitar journalling until many years later, due to the combination of renewed interest in painting (main reason) and increasing hand pain from playing (minor, but aggravated by playing less frequently). The journalling, not art-making judgment is self-imposed, of course, and I realize artists are rarely the best critics of their own work; it comes from acknowledging my persistent disinterest in confronting technical, craft deficiencies with my music in favor of more or less pure emotional indulgence. Not at all nec. a bad thing; I'm not sneering at journalling, and I definitely got some gold from it; the medicine worked while the magic lasted! But as I achieved increasing levels of manual fluency, my lack of discipline did become an increasing problem, leading to ever more hours of formulaic noodling and much rarer strikes of gold... I loved Matthias' remark: "...later it became cleaner and smarter, but more routine…" I never really got smarter, but certainly found the routine harder and harder to avoid, until painting revived itself. And now I find similar issues coming up with that, but also a greater willingness to deal with them. I just read a nice line in a watercolorist's how-I-paint book: "This isn't a how-to book; that would imply that I KNOW how-to!" He goes on to develop the idea that thinking you know how to paint is almost certain to be the end of good painting. The unknown is always where we should be trying go, and turning unknowns into knowns seems to just mean we have to keep on moving, since staying with knowns is like dying... And each new level of mystery seems to be more obscure, and more demanding, than the last. dpc |