Highly Sensitive Painter

It's one thing to step outside myself, intellectualize and give myself advice, but saying truly is easier than doing. One of the most oft heard pieces of advice is so simple it's irritating: "Don't think about it, just do it."

Well, what if I'm HSP?

HSP, or Highly Sensitive Person, (yeah, it's a real thing) is "a person having the innate trait of high sensory processing sensitivity. HSPs process sensory data much more deeply and thoroughly due to a biological difference in their nervous systems."

A large percentage of HSPs are also creative, and they make up about 20% of the population. The other 80% think we're disfunctional, but we're actually the opposite; we are super-functional. HSP is not a disorder. It's a gift.

It has to do with how our brains gate all the stimuli going on around us. Since we take in so much more, we have to do a lot more thinking to process it. I know my brain never goes on vacation. That's why telling myself something like "Don't think about it, just do it" is absurd at best. So. Rather than try to turn my thinking off, I have to turn the dial and change HOW I think.

I have to turn all the negative thoughts down to the lowest audible volume and turn the positive ones on full blast. Instead of thinking "No I can't" I will think "Yes I can." And I will think it constantly. I will bombard myself with: "Oh boy! I'm going to draw! I will be so happy!" whether I believe it or not. Because you know what they say: If you repeat a lie often enough people will swallow it.

I will think it in the back of my head, think it in the front of my head, think it right out loud. I will post signs around the house, make moodboards and scrapbooks. I will write, I will blog, I will collect things that inspire and move - like great words and pictures and music. I will pretend I'm 8 years old again, practicing the piano 30 minutes a day.

I will think it with every biological cell in my biological body every biological second of the day: "I WANT to draw!"

"Yes, you great dithering idiot, pick up the goddamn pencil and start drawing!"

I am so sensitive.


HSP LINKS

• Susan Biali, MD: "Every person who has a talent that they long to play with and develop, but thinks it's silly or a waste of time or too late, needs to understand how important this gift is and understand its worth in their very cells."
• Dr. Elaine Aron: Are You Highly Sensitive? The Self Test
• Are You a Highly Sensitive Person?
• Top 10 Survival Tips for the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP)
• Why It's Hard to Be a Highly Sensitive (HSP) Introvert
• Wikipedia: Sensory processing sensitivity
• Elaine Aron: The Highly Sensitive Person
• The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius

Filling the Gap

Last week I watched a little animated film called The Gap, with Ira Glass talking about how to work through creative blocks. This is what he has to say to people who are starting out:

1. Your work is not as good as you'd like, but you can see this because your taste is killer

2. This is normal

3. Do a lot of work

4. Put yourself on a deadline

5. Fight your way through

In an effort to do a lot of work, put myself on a deadline and fight my way through, I am trying to sketch every day. Precisely as Ira Glass says, my work is not as good as I'd like, but as long as I can see that, there's hope. To reach a happy point I must do volumes of work and push myself to finish something every week. One of the reasons I started this blog is to give myself deadlines and, I promise you, I will do my best to meet them and post as much as I can.

Today my creative gap took me to Big Rock Ridge overlooking Lucas Valley, one of my favorite geological gaps. My resulting efforts aren't the greatest but at least I can see that. So I guess there's hope.

On the radio along the way, NPR's Terry Gross was interviewing filmmaker David O. Russell (American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook.) Right as I stepped into the car he was talking about difficult setbacks he'd been through and he said: "If I'm going to come back from this, I'm going to do it from my heart." 

Listen to Terry Gross on NPR: David O. Russell Interview
Watch David Shiyang Liu's version 1: Ira Glass on Storytelling
Watch Daniel Frohlocke's version 2: THE GAP by Ira Glass

Woman in a Studio

My rendering of 'Woman in a Room' by Pierre Bonnard. Click here to see the original.

Do I love being an artist or do I love the idea of being an artist? I do love art. I do love creating things. But as far as being the real deal, have I been completely honest with myself? What else do I think I love about being an artist?

Being true to myself, being my true self

Putting my natural talents to use

Creating things that are an extention of me

Getting recognition for my work

Finishing something I started

Finding something I lost

Having a creative aura that even strangers see

Running with an artsy crowd

Wrapping myself in a creative environment

Feeling proud of what I do and what I am

And getting to have a really kick-ass studio!

That last one might be the most honest. Sometimes I think the only reason I want to be an artist is because I want to have a studio, since I love decorating. But shouldn't I be a little uncomfortable with how pretentious that is? how materialistic? I felt that way until I read this:

In the course of an interview, [an artist] said: "I am not sure whether the word 'vocation' exactly applies to me. At that time I had not quite realized that I wanted to be a painter. I think that what attracted me then was less art itself than the artistic life, with all that I thought it meant in terms of free expression of imagination and freedom to live as one pleased. Of course I had been attracted by painting and drawing for a long time, without this becoming an irresistible passion: at any cost however I wanted to escape from a monotonous existence."

Sounds a little phony, doesn't it? Until you consider that the artist was the great French Impressionist Pierre Bonnard. So there you go. Whatever your bliss, follow it. It will lead to all the other blisses you should be following.

If we choose to pursue something new - a career, a relationship, a place - only to find we chose wrong, WE are not wrong for having made that choice. Life is a series of choices, of trying new things, a map of many paths. We will never find out if a path is right unless we take it, and the more paths we take, the more fantastic the journey will be. Our one whole life is made up of many smaller lives, which we are born into by reinventing ourselves over and over.

And, damn it, if a kick-ass studio is what it takes, then it's high time for me to kick my ass into one!

Forgiven

Maybe this is the problem.

I look around for an object to draw but I am overwhelmed at the thought of representing something exactly as it is. I look at a cup and it's perfect symmetry is daunting. Because it's manufactured?

What about Nature? With Nature I feel so much more comfortable. Is it because it will forgive my mistakes and encourage my interpretations?

I like the idea that Nature forgives. I realize there is perfection in Nature too, but it is transient. It transforms itself continually. First it is perfect, then it is imperfect, in a constant dance between the two. So does it matter which I manage to represent? If I can't match it in it's perfect state, I think my imperfect effort can be forgiven.

Perhaps the way for me to approach that which is not Nature, is to treat it the way Nature would. The hard straight edges of a house abandoned and uncared for become softened and bowed when taken over by Nature. The manufactured symmetry of the cup chips and its slick finish is dulled and discolored. What could be more beautiful?

I can do this. If Nature can forgive me, so can I.

Rennaissance

No, I did not become the great artist I set out to be. Or the illustrator, or the designer, or the decorator, or the writer, or even the concert pianist. I had the chopsticks. Back when I was starting out, an older artist marveled at how I had already found my own style. She said most artists spend their whole lives searching for it. I was 12. But after a starry five year run illustrating for an international greeting card company, I did the worst thing an artist can do. I stopped.

To be fair to myself, it had to do with survival. There's a reason why we're called poor and starving. When not being ripped off, artists have been held to the lowest wages of all workers, women artists get paid less than men, we work without safety nets of any kind and... have you ever tried surviving on $3000 a year? It's enough to make anybody quit.

Then there are the social landmines. All our lives, from every direction, we are bombarded by pressure to fit in. True creatives can't do that. It is within our very cells to want to think for ourselves, ask questions and respond creatively to challenges - all extraordinary gifts to be sure - but don't do it or you'll do it alone... probably wearing a beret.

It doesn't help that others think of what we do as playing, not working. "Oh, you're an artist! Lucky you!" Let me assure you, while creating art can be joyous, it is also dull, tedious, stressful and physically and emotionally demanding. But it gets worse. For years, psychologists have studied the links between creativity and HSP, depression and madness. Try surviving any of that.

As a kid I used to lose myself in drawing to escape my pain, over time it became my pain. So why would I want to go back? Because, of all the misguided things I did with my life, nothing was more deeply regretted than throwing away my talent. We don't do art because it's fun, we do it because we are driven, we are compelled. We do art because we can't not do it. When we stop, we go against nature and all creation.

So I want to go back. The good news is that creativity is never lost. It incubates. It deepens. And one day, if you let it, it reemerges stronger than ever. "Renaissance" means "rebirth" in French. After forty years of stumbling through The Dark Ages, I am entering my Rennaissance. With a name like Renn, how can I not?