The Gift of Failure

“There is no such thing as failure — failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.”

Oprah Winfrey

Ride the Peace Train

One of my favorite blogs I follow religiously is a blog called "Brain Pickings" - a site I only discovered because a dear friend pointed me in that direction. The author, Maria Popova, is articulate, extremely well-read, refreshingly insightful and she always writes on art and literature with such a perfect sense of what is important in the work she's reviewing.  The author herself calls Brain Pickings a "weekly interestingness digest." 

and she'd be right. I've yet to scroll through the Sunday edition without getting caught up in the valuable lessons she shares through the work, writing and art of others, not to mention her own remarkably astute commentary. 

A few weeks ago, I marked an article to read later and then, as often happens, forgot about it in the crush of springtime activities - Easter, family visits, my Mom's 90th birthday, etc. But once I had a brief moment to go back to the file, I discovered this marvelous gem amidst all the other great articles on the Blog. It's an article on a subject we've probably all encountered but often neglected to dig into - failure. We avoid the topic because it has negative connotations, particularly in a society where it's often "winner take all" and "dog eat dog." Even our television shows express clearly how we feel about this subject - "Failure is not an option." 

We reject it because it has negative associations for us - failing damages our self-esteem, destroys our dreams, labels us as less than worthy. Or does it? As this marvelous quote above from Oprah Winfrey suggests, there are a gazillion lessons in failure and as many treasures to be found in those lessons that we would not learn any other way. It IS why and how we change direction and find another way around what seem to be insurmountable obstacles. There really could be no true success without a willingness and a capacity to accept what failure has to teach us. 

Popova's blog on the Gift of Failure comes from the title of a book by Sarah Lewis - 

The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery.  Lewis is the former curator of the Tate Modern Gallery and MoMA and a member of President Obama's Arts Policy Committee. In her book, she uses the example of Thomas Edison who tried endlessly to create a working lightbulb and said of his efforts, "I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won't work." I think there are so many valuable lessons that Popova and Lewis have explored that I'd like to turn you on to the blog site with this introduction: 

Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Crucial Difference Between Success and Mastery

You  won't  be  sorry  that  you  were  introduced  to  this  wonderful  online  source  of  profound ideas  and  insight guarantee.

Speaking of failure, however, I wonder if you noticed that there is no link beneath my own artwork above. That's because it's not posted on any of my sites yet - and it may not ever be. I've reworked this piece 100 times - starting with a simple photograph that was small and not terribly good to begin with. But I loved the composition of the piece and I was listening to Cat Stevens singing Peace Train one night and decided to try to do something with this. I consider this work a "failure" in the sense that I've not managed to achieve what I hoped with it - it doesn't "deliver" the feeling I wanted it to. But each reworking teaches me something new about digital art and painting and that's invaluable to me for the future. I may not ever finish this work to my satisfaction but what I've learned by failing to do it has stood me in very good stead in other works. 

What would make our blogging more successful?

Consider this a bit of honest self-talk. The message is for me and if it's helpful to you, I'll be thrilled. But mostly, I'm going through this exercise to share the kinds of things I've been thinking about and hope that at the end of the conversation, I might have an answer that will be of use to all of us. Ready?

Okay, so here's what's been on my mind...how do I build an audience for my blog that extends beyond a few artist friends (or even a lot of artist friends) and develops a mainstream following? I've been noticing that a lot of blogs that I follow are followed by the same people, that generally we all post our artwork with or without some related story or commentary, and that even those who have a gazillion supposed followers have few likes and fewer comments. Sharing my blog post on other social media sites - even once per site - does not get me more readers...it might get me a lot of likes on Facebook, quite a few 1+s on Google but it doesn't really get people to come in and read and leave a comment. Viewers are "liking" the art which is a nice thing to do - rather than getting much out of the blog itself. We're all trying to be so supportive of each other - sharing or reblogging - assuming more likes will move our blogs up higher in the search engines (and maybe it does but I'm not seeing a huge ROI -return on investment). Sometimes it can feel a bit as if the "music" is falling on deaf ears even when we're all trying so hard to be nice!

So I got to thinking about some fundamentals and some rules of the road. First - why am I blogging in the first place? Why are any of us? Probably most of us would say it's a marketing tool - one more way to get our artwork into the public eye. For some, that might be reason enough - if your artwork already has a significant following, your customers are going to appreciate seeing your "brand" in as many places as possible. But I'm guessing most of us are "wanna bes" - we're trying to develop a brand and a customer base and expand the market for our artwork. Blogging and posting to fellow artists probably isn't going to make that happen - as nice as it is to get positive feedback from friends who like what we write or create. And it occurs to me that while I might work my rear end off to write frequently and to present my artwork as part of a broader package, the truth is that my blog is just one more excuse to post images from my portfolios on other sites.

Truthfully, I don't want to flood my friends' social media feeds with post after post about my blog - or my art - and not have more to offer them than that. While I enjoy seeing my friends' artwork or being reminded - ONCE - that they've a new blog post to look at, I really don't like seeing the same reminder from someone show up a dozen times in a dozen different groups on Facebook and I'm sure no one wants to see mine more than once either. In fact, I mistakenly posted an image yesterday that I had posted about 4 days ago and someone rather pointedly (but sweetly) said, "It's nice to see this lovely piece again." I got the point.

There's got to be more reason than trying to "sell" my artwork to justify the work it takes to maintain a blog. And certainly, there have to be more good reasons for anyone to read the blog than just to look at one more post of my artwork. What are those reasons - and would any of those be a clue about how to grow an audience for what I write? Unless the content I provide is both interesting and useful to you, reading this blog is just one more way to support a fellow artist - and take up valuable time doing so and getting little in return. I've honestly tried to keep the content relevant and meaningful, to share some insights on the meaning and purpose in life, on how to remain hopeful in the face of difficulty, and on what virtues or values we might express in our art to add value to it. But in the end, it's all still tied to my art work.

What could I offer in my blog that would make it worth your while to actually read it? I can share insights I've gained from others - people far more successful than I am. Or I can share non-art related ideas and opinions. I can share the love - by sharing the work of others or the ideas of others that is certainly more valuable than mine. I can make my blog more of a conversation and less of a sales pitch. But what else? Why don't you tell me what it is that keeps you reading other blogs, leaving comments or spreading the word about that blog? (Besides the fact that you are all such lovely people and so supportive!!) What would you like to see here that would interest you, inspire you and be of value to you in your own life or art career? This is one case where comments are certainly more welcome than a like - no matter how precious those are!! So I'm inviting you to express an honest opinion and assure you that I will value each voice!

Thanks in advance,
Lianne

Letting the thought simmer...

In the great artist you see daring bound by discipline and discipline stretched by daring. 

(Robert Brault) from
http://artquotes.robertgenn.com

As Time Goes By (inspired by the song of the same name)

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/as-time-goes-by-lianne-schneider.html

People have often asked me why I write...why I picked up a pen to write poetry at the age of 60 when I'd done very little writing before that. And I have some pretty articulate answers (I hope) I've shared in my volumes of poetry and will share here too. But very few people have ever asked me HOW I write - the creative process behind any given poem. So I'd like to talk about that today as well. I'm fairly certain that the process is not unlike that most artists go through but it is a bit different for me from how I create an artwork.

Let me tackle the why first. People have told me that my poetry is very personal, intimate or evocative, maybe even that it exposes too much of who I am or what circumstances have shaped my life. Perhaps that's true - but as I said the other day, there is great freedom in letting down the walls of pretense and allowing oneself to be vulnerable. I can be exactly who I am. Still I don’t write or create just to “emote” or have some kind of catharsis. I create in order to share something of myself, yes, but something I hope that has universal application, something that will “help” another person make sense out of life. I like to think that my own experiences - painful, joyful or introspective - have some universal application and like artists in other genres, hope that as a poet I share where my own journey has taken me in a quest to answer the great mythic questions of who we are as both physical and spiritual beings, how we should live with one another, what we can learn from suffering or loss, and what our own individual purpose might be as part of the connected whole.

I often write or create from what seems to be a dark place, from grief or sorrow, heartbreak or illness, but I almost always wind up with hope or with an expression of something extremely positive gained from even the worst of experiences. For me the bottom line is love…period. Love conquers all, redeems all, renews all, and I am convinced that love is the divine light within each and every one of us if only we would lift our eyes, open our hearts and uncover/recover what we have hidden from ourselves out of fear. I try to remind myself constantly that “everything but love is a lie.”

So that pretty much covers the why; now for the how. If there were any factor in my background aside from an almost idyllic childhood spent in the country that played a role in how I work and think as an artist/writer today, it would be my teaching career. For me, teaching wasn’t a job…it wasn’t even something I “did.” From the very first moment I set foot in a classroom, I knew that teacher was who I AM not what I DO. And I gave it my all – every ounce of creativity I possessed went into my planning, my instruction…and what I learned from that that is still essential to both my writing and my art was that there were many different ways to say the same thing, teach the same principle and what was important was to find the way or ways that each of my students could relate to, a way to translate my own “story” into something more universal. I could write a book – should have – on how that works.

But I also bring the same kind of “discipline” to my writing and my art that I did to my teaching – lots of preparation, lots of editing to find a better way to say it, lots of continuing study for myself to learn how to be an even better creator/teacher, a more informed person. My students respected that in me – that I was always prepared, always willing to try again another way, that I worked as hard or harder than I expected them to work. I guess I think of my art and writing as one more “lesson plan” so to speak, and I want to be sure it expresses what I believe is an “essential element” in the course of life.

Specifically, my preparation involves a number of steps beginning with an openness to what sparks that creative urge to write - perhaps it's a song lyric, a line from a novel that I'm reading, a storm or a natural event, the change of seasons. I keep prolific notes in a little notebook I carry with me everywhere. There I record whole paragraphs from inspirational books that I find meaningful, or just a single phrase that occurred to me while I was driving somewhere. Next, I might actually research an idea so that I don't wander too far afield  - for example, I've a poem called The Observer Effect which I'll post in a day or so for which I spent weeks studying to understand the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. I took reams of notes, even diagrams, and read about Schrodinger's cat and the debate over this fairly recent principle in quantum physics.

What do I do with all those notes? I make a point to reread everything I've put in my notebook every day and I pick one idea to play with, writing a line or two on which I might be able to build a new poem. Then I do the most important thing...I leave it alone for a bit. I move these bits and pieces, these lines and phrases into a file that I call "my simmering pot." And I let the ideas slow simmer for days, weeks, maybe even months. It's always in the back of my mind and some new idea or experience, something I've heard in a lecture, read in a book, may connect with what's gone before and trigger a few more lines. When I've got the bare bones or the framework for a poem, I move it to another file I call "building blocks." These are the pieces I work on every morning - trying to expand and refine what I've already got finished. From building block to finished poem might take a day or a year...and I've no way to predict that. Some poems have been sitting unfinished in my files for years now and some internal roadblock keeps me from being able to edit them or rewrite them. Maybe because they are too personal or maybe just the opposite...they aren't fully truthful. I find I cannot finish a poem if it doesn't honestly reflect what I truly feel. The idea might have sounded good at first but if it isn't me, it doesn't get written. Occasionally, as with the poem and image I posted a couple of days ago, I don't post a poem until I've created an artwork to go with it because the words alone don't say everything I want to say. 

So that's the why and the how of it - I'm not sure any of that is helpful to other artists, whether we're talking visual or written arts. But for myself, I apply much the same process to visual arts so I have so many "works in progress" that it would take the rest of my life to complete them. That accounts for my limited number of posts - I have something like 148 images to show for the three years I've been on Fine Art America and fewer than that on other sites. 

If you've been having trouble with inspiration lately or you feel as if you're stuck in a rut in terms of style or subject matter, perhaps it would help to let your ideas "simmer" for a while before trying to finish it. There's no rush, is there? Great work takes time and discipline.  

Epiphany - have you had one?

Sometimes the dreams that come true are dreams you never even realized you had.

Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones

Epiphany

http://www.lianneschneiderart.com/Art/Digital-PaintingPhotoArt/i-KV84mZv/A

Someone asked me at one point which of my poems or artworks most conveys what my vision and my spiritual and personal life journey is like at this late stage of my life. My answer is always the same. Although most of my poetry, particularly that designed or created especially to accompany an image or vice versa, reflects who I am or where I've been, this image and poem really say it best. “Epiphany” is a very emotionally charged statement of what still drives me every day and underlines my hope and the image is a composite of those things that were part of my "awakening" if you will.

In this case, the image of course was created to go with the poem, specifically to try to say visually what I expressed in the poem and to do that in a way that would be representative of who I saw myself to be as a writer and artist at that time. The central element in the image is a symbol that is important to me from my experience with meditation – it’s a variation of and an extension of something called a Tau Cross – note that it is the intersection of what I see as my connection to the earth (the roots) and to the universal mind – the explosion of light/thought/energy from the center and all arching to form a heart – representing the LOVE I feel for all life, for that which is beautiful and inspiring. 

I do have moments when I’m alone in my “cave,” when I’m standing beside the sea or walking up a creek, or just watching a glorious sunset when I am simply overcome with emotion. I never realized until I allowed myself to open up and express it, just how deeply emotional I am. I never cried – and even when my beloved grandmother died, my father died and my husband died, I cried very little. I was the “rock” upon whom everyone leaned. Now tears come easily – as often from joy or wonder as from sadness or grief. But I’m still an impatient person in many ways – I want to KNOW everything. I want to know how to do everything so I can create more effectively.

Where do you find your inspiration?? 20 possibilities

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/ralphwaldo130588.html#3aXWtx5Q88lrMHjF.99

Sugar Palace

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-sugar-palace--river-road-blues-lianne-schneider.html

We've all run into it at once time or another - artists' block, writers' block - just plain creatively blocked. It's frustrating, even a bit scary. I once went six months unable to write a single poem and I was absolutely certain that I'd never write again. I joked about how my muse had gone on vacation and just decided not to return. But I was extremely distressed. I turned to art then tentatively at first, and was inspired by history, the blues, and certainly other artists. But the writer's block persisted and the creative block returned even about the art work. 

Maybe that happens because we just have too much on our plates at any given time and we need to withdraw from creative activities. That's what I tried to tell myself, at least.  But the truth is if we need to withdraw from creating...then it's not an essential part of who we are. Our art, our writing should be many things to us - therapeutic, cathartic, joyful, fulfilling - but it shouldn't be something we can just walk away from for months at a time without concern. Regardless of what our responsibilities are, if it's fundamental to our identities, then we have to MAKE time for it, no matter what. If that means getting out of bed an hour early or going to bed an hour later, so be it.

So what on earth do you do when absolutely nothing seems to inspire you, when you look at that blank sheet of paper or that empty canvas and don't have a single creative thought? Great artists and great writers have offered all kinds of advice - I remember reading something in poet May Sarton's journal where she said that no matter what she felt or didn't feel, she MADE herself sit down and write for at least one hour every single morning. It didn't matter if all she wrote were remembered lines of an old poem or someone's speech - she wrote whatever popped into her head for at least an hour. Sometimes, though, even such a disciplined approach won't work. 

Here's a great list of ideas for inspiration from the folks at ArtProMotivate:
"Feeling inspired can be tough at times, especially for artists who have a 9-5 job outside of art. We may be too tired to think straight, or distracted by our daily routine. In such situations, we have to search for sources of inspiration and creativity." Read the rest at: 
20 Art Inspiration Ideas for Creativity - Artpromotivate

Remember too that one of the most creatively inspiring things we can do is teach or inspire someone else. There's an old adage that says whatever it is you wish to learn, teach. Lead by example. In teaching others to plumb their own creative depths and find their own unique expression, we discover over and over again that the well of our creativity is bottomless. 

 

On Mystery and Wonder...

"Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis for man's desire to understand."
Neil Armstrong

 

Writer/philosopher Sam Keen in his best-selling book, Fire in the Belly, advised that today’s men (not women) needed to go on a sacred quest to discover the fire in their bellies that “ignites the flame in their hearts.” He called this quest the “heroic journey” – much the same as Joseph Campbell described in “The Power of Myth.” Keen may not have intended the book for women as it is subtitled “On Being a Man,” but I loved it so much and my own copies became so dog-eared from re-reading that I’m on my fourth copy of it and cherish it above most of my books. The author speaks of today’s hero as being almost opposite in character from our traditional heroes whom we have imagined “larger than life.” Today, our heroes may remain off the radar because the foundation for their character is humility and modesty rather than standing apart and above other men. 

I think the quest he describes is universal and I know his description of it was the first step on my own sacred quest which has led me inevitably to art and poetry to express the mystery and wonder I experience each step of the way. To successfully complete the hero’s journey, Keen says we must possess ten heroic virtues and the first he talks about is wonder. That was enough to capture my heart.  He went on to share a poem he’d written about his father whom he called the great exemplar of wonder and he concludes the poem with this amazing line of tribute to a father who taught him much about the hero’s quest – “In his ambiance, I learned that it is a good thing to take time to wonder.” Every heroic journey must begin with a renewed sense wonder – ours too. Have you taken the time lately to observe the caution to “Stop, Look and Listen?” Stop because our eyes need time to see what is beautiful in all around us, look with wonder, and listen in awe to the mystery that is life. And mystery remains for me one of the things that inspires my creativity the most. 

 Mystery

© Lianne Schneider - 2011

http://www.bluecanvas.com/art-detail/237232

Among the artists who make me stand in awe and delve into the mystery is Anne (Nancy) Lacy whose digital art is unlike any other and whose series “Passages to the Soul” left me awestruck and deeply captivated. There are so many whose photographs cause me to stop, whose paintings make look, and whose digital creations evoke wonder expressed only where my heart can listen for it, that I can only hope to scratch the surface by mentioning them here and there. 

[Addendum: Please let me know if you are unable to leave a comment. I understand that you must be logged in to your Google + account to do so. If need be, I’ll change my settings but that would mean that I’ll lose all the beautiful comments on previous blogs when I disable that.]