I finished my Portfolio online class a week or so ago. I really enjoyed running this one, and I found that recording myself as I went along carving out a portfolio of raw material was a good decision.
I wanted to show the viewer that the creative process is an intuitive one, where any decision will take you on an unknown path with an unknown outcome, and specifically - this is ok. This is what creativity is about.
Over the years I have run workshops, I have found that many creatives feel lost when they are lost, and that if they are lost, believe that it is a sign of failure. But I think this is false. We have to get lost, to end up somewhere we haven’t been before, and to be doing things outside our normal parameters. Doing the same old thing all the time does not encourage growth, but being lost somewhere new invites us to experience new things and to incorporate them in our work.
But the thorny subject of confidence has come up many times over the years, and this portfolio development class was no exception. I felt that many of the questions that were asked, said a lot about the authors view on success and failure. Many of the questions were their own answers, yet the authors of them did not realise that they were answering their own questions. They did not realise that they had an opinion, and they weren’t listening to what their own gut was telling them.
One of the examples of this, that I see on my workshops is the question that usually goes something like this:
“do you think x would be good to do?”
This is really someone asking themselves ‘I think this might be worth trying’. But rather than going with their hunch, the author of the question looks for confirmation elsewhere. That is where I think my role comes in. I have never really liked the badge of ‘teacher’, instead, I have often thought of myself as someone who is there to ‘guide’ or assume a helpful role as ‘sounding board’, and to enable the student’s own thought processes.
Listening to oneself isn’t easy, and I do not write these words with criticism towards my students. I realise that having to learn to trust oneself, and to realise that when we ask questions such as ‘would this be worth trying out?’ that this is really intuition telling us where to go next.
We live in such a structured world. Everything is results based, and because of it, everyone thinks this way. ‘success’ or ‘failure’ is how most of what we do creatively speaking is judged, when in fact, I think these are only distractions. There is no success or failure, just a ‘performance’. It is why I personally abhor photographic competitions. Art is not competitive, and you should not be fighting with yourself or comparing yourself to others.
Assuming that one may make the wrong decision when creating art is very destructive to the role that creativity offers. There are no right or wrong decisions, just the aforementioned ‘performance’. Any performer will tell you that one performance is different from another, and that the quality of what they do fluctuates. When you realise this, you become free of the shackles of ‘bad’ or ‘good’, and instead find yourself thinking more along the lines of ‘that was different’.
To be creative, means to experiment. Experimentation by definition means we do not know what the outcome will be. We are trying things out, seeing how they fit, and altering things to make them the way we like, as we go along.
When we do something that does not reach what we had aimed for, there may be a new avenue rather than a dead-end to go down. Being open to happy-mistakes is important in recognising that there is a flow to creativity that cannot be pre-determined. We just have to let go, and see where it takes us.
It is this ‘letting go’ which eludes a lot of us. We feel we have to know the outcome, before the outcome has been realised. We feel we have to know what we’re doing, when in fact, not knowing, and being lost is almost an essential ingredient in being creative.
And so I think it all comes down to confidence. In accepting that whatever we do create, does not need to be judged.
Nothing is a failure, everything is a stepping stone.
Confidence is about trusting oneself, even if oneself does not know what the outcome may be.
I wish I knew how to teach people this. It’s just so hard. With most students, I often feel I am fighting a life-time of learned restrictions and self imposed rules. You don’t break old habits like this overnight. But I am convinced that most of us are into this creative endeavour because of how freeing it is, and how different it is from the normal structures and limits placed upon us.