Up And Down

In what's becoming regular feature, here's a quote from this week's reading from The Artist's Way.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite -- getting something down. The directions are important here.

If we are trying to think something up, we are straining to reach for something that's just beyond our grasp, "up there, in the stratosphere, where art lives on high..."

When we are getting something down, there is no strain. We're not doing; we're getting. Someone or something else is doing the doing. Instead of reaching for inventions, we are engaged in listening.

When an actor is in the moment, he or she is engaged in listening for the next right thing creatively. When a painter is painting, he or she may begin with a plan, but that plan is soon surrendered to the painting's own plan. This is often expressed as "The brush takes the next stroke." In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.

Art is an act of tuning in and dropping down the well. It is as though all the stories, painting, music, performances in the world live just under the surface of our normal consciousness. Like an underground river, they flow through us as a stream of ideas that we can tap down into. As artists, we drop down the well into the stream. We hear what's down there and we act on it -- more like taking dictation than anything fancy having to do with art.