Monday, March 7, 2011

Working it out from the collective...


I am struggling (joyously, it's true) to express my visions in glass. I find that I have to go through some immense personal transformation to actually get the image into manifestation. It's very easy to feel like "not talented enough" an artist... when you hear of others that just spit the stuff out. But I do know that those of us who are multi-talented have to give the universe a time to catch up with the area we're focusing on and wanting to manifest in NOW. :)

I found this excerpted piece of writing by John Lennon, from the archives of Playboy. I feel that he captured perfectly the challenge and joys of birthing creativing through you. Enjoy!



"Not really. It actually took me five years for them to come out….The physical writing was within a three-week period. There’s a Zen story that Yoko once told me—and I think I might have told it in “Lennon Remembers” or “Playboy Forgets.” A king sent his messenger to an artist to request a painting, he paid the artist the money, and the painter said, “OK, come back.” So a year goes by, and the messenger comes back and tells him, “The king’s waiting for his painting,” and the painter says, “Oh, hold on,” and whips it off right in front of him and says, “Here.” And the messenger says, “What’s this? The king paid you 20,000 bucks for this shit, and you knock it off in five minutes?” And the painter replies, “Yeah, but I spent 10 years thinking about it.” And there’s no way I could have written the "Double Fantasy" songs without those five years.

Even great artists struggle with self-doubt. And art often needs a gestation period, except on those few occasions when the gods offer you the more or less final product as a gift.

The gods generally won't arrive though until after a prolonged period of hard work. Maybe they have a academy up there that gives out Awards for Dedication.


Sometimes, I may do a painting that takes several months and when it is finished, I am exhausted. Then the very next day I will get an idea or a notion about wanting to do something, and do it spontaneously, and hit it right on the nose.
Once I was talking to Robert Frost about a poem of his that is so beautifully written, it is considered by some to be actually perfect. It is called 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.' And I asked him, "You must have worked a long time on that. It must have been done in the middle of the winter. What was your experience?" He said, 'Andy, I'll tell you about that. I'd been writing a very complicated, long-drawn-out poem, almost a story type of poem entitled 'Death of a Hired Man.' I had finished at two o'clock in the morning. It was a hot August night, and I was exhausted. I walked out on the porch of my house and looked at the mountain range. It came to me in a flash! I wrote it on an envelope I had in my pocket, and I only changed one word. It came out just like that."
- Andrew Wyeth from the book Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth

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