G. Steve Journal

Words Are Not There

When you finish anything, people want you to then talk about it. And I think it’s almost like a crime. A film or a painting...each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language...it’s not going to translate. It’s going to lose.

                                                                                                                –– David Lynch

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Going Together

Filmmaker David Lynch's observation is not only true generally, but is often the key to the creative process:

Life is filled with abstractions and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution. It’s emotion and intellect going together.

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Kind of Life

 

In my grandparents' time, it was believed that spirits existed everywhere...in trees, rivers, insects, wells, anything... I like the idea that we should all treasure everything because spirits might exist there, and we should treasure everything because there is a kind of life to everything.

                                                                                                                                            –– Hayao Miyazaki

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The Other

One eye sees, the other feels.

                     - Paul Klee

 

 

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Relax!

Here's an observation by author Aldous Huxley ("Doors of Perception" ,"Brave New World") regarding the paradox of creativity: reconciling the discipline of doing the work with the necessity of allowing room for the artistic and intuitive subconscious to kick in:

Take the piano teacher...he always says, Relax, relax. But how can you relax while your fingers are rushing over the keys? Yet they have to relax. The singing teacher and the golf pro say exactly the same thing. And in the realm of spiritual exercises we find that the person who teaches mental prayer does too. We have somehow to combine relaxation with activity… The personal conscious self being a kind of small island in the midst of an enormous area of consciousness... What has to be relaxed is the personal self, the self that tries too hard, that thinks it knows what is what, that uses language. This has to be relaxed in order that the multiple powers at work within the deeper and wider self may come through and function as they should. In all psychophysical skills we have this curious fact of the law of reversed effort: the harder we try, the worse we do the thing.

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Pick The Flowers

 

Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.

                                                                                                                            –– Hermann Hesse

 

Don't Think

At some level, all endeavors, not just those labeled "art", may call upon our creative instincts.

The experienced practitioner has the good sense to listen to and respect the muscle memory and intuition born of years of practice, as described here by custom builder Mark Ellison:

“Your body just knows how to do it,” he said. “It understands weight and leverage and space in a way that your brain would take forever to figure out.” It was the same sense that told Ellison where to set a chisel or if another millimetre of wood had to come off. “I know this carpenter named Steve Allen,” he said. “He turned to me one day and he said, ‘I don’t get it. When I do this work, I have to concentrate, and you’re just talking your fool head off all day long.’ The secret is, I don’t think. I figure something out and then I’m done thinking. I don’t bother with my brain anymore."

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Own Impressions

 

My work is always better when I am alone and follow my own impressions.

                                                                                                          –  Claude Monet

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Lost

You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you'll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost.

                                                                                                                         –– Francis Ford Coppola

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Fire In You

Musician Bruce Springsteen was interviewed this past week by The Daily Show's Trevor Noah:

Trevor: When you create, do you still have doubts sometimes?

Springsteen: Any good artist wrestles with their insecurities. It’s your insecurities that move you forward. If you were simply completely comfortable with who you are and what you’re doing and what you’ve done, I don’t know if you would have the fire in you to move forward. It’s your doubts and your questions and your searching for new and different answers that move you forward in your work.

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