Drawing the Way Home
In the introduction to my book, The Creative Spiral, I write: I believe that the yearning that I hear so often in people’s voices when they talk about their unexpressed creative-within is, in fact, a deep longing to belong. In our pursuit of comfort, security, ‘rightness’, status and other social constraints we have lost sight of our real identity as clusters of glorious stardust. When we transcend the boundaries of our conditioned perspectives and suppressed creativity through the arts, we do finally find a way to connect again with the stardust that we are made of. This is precisely why we have this hunger to create. It is within us from our very earliest days.
This is something that I began to understand from Meriel Hoare’s (now known as Meriel Gold) 'Coming Home’ life drawing weekend courses that I attended years ago. For two entire days we would work intensively - drawing, drawing, drawing, and then drawing some more.
The first time I went I was sent the list of materials we needed to take and thought there had been a typo – we were to bring EIGHT rolls of lining wallpaper! And yet, by the end of the weekend every inch of that paper would have been covered with drawings, and often we would be turning the paper over to draw more on the other side before we left.
The drawings were all of dancing figures drawn from real life in real time.
We’d start the session by closing our eyes and getting centred. Then, still with eyes closed, Meriel would ask us first to feel the texture of the paper, then to pick up a pencil and feel and hear the movement of a pencil passing over the paper.
By the time we were allowed to open our eyes and gaze at the model in the middle of the room, the atmosphere would be charged with creative intensity and concentration. Now we would watch as the dance began and the model moved to the music. As we watched we began to get a sense of every subtle twist and tensed limb; would become aware of how and where the weight was falling on any strained joint. Only once the movement had stopped and a pose held, would we be allowed to start to work. Fast. It was as though you had caught the crest of the wave and needed to ride it as long as you could.
We drew using three dilutions of black ink – thin, medium and undiluted. We used fingers, hands, bamboo pens, charcoal, pencil red chalk, coloured ink, feather quills. Sometimes the pose would last a mere few seconds; other times it could last minutes – even as long as ten or fifteen minutes on rare occasions.
We would work so fast to capture the essence of the poses that changed with breathtaking rapidity, that we’d have shift the roll of paper on over the table before the ink had time to dry in order to get the next drawing down. So, drips would appear making the drawings seem to be all joined up. It was nerve-wracking.
Most of us would be in tears by the end of the first day - exhausted and disheartened by all the day’s 'failures.' The thing is, our egos were running the narrative. We were all used to judging our work on the basis of criteria that did not apply to this way of working. They were parameters of perfection based on exact representations and completion, and there was no way in the world that either of those could have been met given the time constraints we’d been working under.
Basically, we had exposed one of the biggest blocks to our creativity: the Ego, and it’s something that comes up over and over again in my book, because it is a big topic and a major obstacle when it comes to creative ‘flow.’
There’s a conundrum here. You see, we do need our egos. They are what help us to get on in life. You could argue that, without ego we simply wouldn’t survive because we would have no sense of self-preservation in a world where challenges lurk at every corner. However, the ego is a mask, and its role is self-protection. But, when we come to depend on it too much, we start to run into problems by mistakenly confusing the Self with the mask (Ego) that we have adopted in order to make our way in the world. When that happens we become subservient to an ego that dictates and controls, and we lose our connection with the very essence of life itself.
The first day of Meriel’s workshop had cracked the mask, and we were not comfortable about it.
The second day would start just as the first had, with silent contemplation, and a few minutes to ‘arrive’ in the space and at the task of capturing the fleeting moments of stillness that a dancing figure is able to hold before yielding to the tension of its position. And now the work began to feel electrifyingly exciting as we gave in to the necessary immediacy, all thoughts stilled now. Everything that we had been through the previous day had laid to rest the ego’s strident voice. We were beginning to understand something else. All that mattered was to allow our arms and hands to respond intuitively to the form and movement and point of balance that our eyes were capturing, and then to transfer that physical experience to the paper through brush and ink.
At the end of the weekend, exhausted and exhilarated, we would spread our metre-upon-metre of lining wallpaper on the floor, until the entire workspace was covered in drawings. Painstakingly, Meriel would look everything over and every now and then she would see something that caught her attention. Often it was the smallest of marks, a couple of centimetres in length, that she wanted to point out to us because of the honesty and integrity contained within it, because it was a mark that spoke of a real connection that someone had made in that moment.
It was through working with Meriel, making these drawings that I began to understand some truths (for me) about making art. It was there that I began to learn to align eye, heart and hand, and to understand that my work was better when I could let go of Ego’s control. It was only then that I could connect with something much bigger and more profound which transmitted itself into the marks that appeared on the paper.
It made sense to call the workshops ‘Coming Home’.
If you are inspired to explore more ways to move through your creative process, you will find plenty of insights and exercises in my book, The Creative Spiral.
It is a blend of personal experience, spiritual insight and practical activities in an accessible guide that offers writers, artists, musicians, performers and makers of every kind fresh ways to reconnect with imagination, confidence and flow.
Whether beginning a creative journey, recovering from burnout or searching for renewed inspiration, you are invited to move beyond fear, trust your intuition and rediscover the transformative power of making.
In it I draw parallels with the wisdom of the Tarot's Major Arcana. From the fearful possibilities of The Fool and the visionary energy of The Magician to the intuitive depths of The High Priestess, each card becomes a gateway to understanding the joys, frustrations, blocks and breakthroughs every creative person encounters.
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