Have you ever watched an artist draw? I’ve had people tell me they enjoy watching me draw. Not just the image unfolding, like these videos I’ve been making, but watching me draw.  I find this bewildering.  A very dear friend explained it to me, that I am at my most unselfconscious and that it is novel.  He was right, of course.  I’d describe it but because I’m so unselfconscious in that state I don’t actually know what I look like while I’m drawing. I will just make up a story about it, instead.

I push my hair around until it’s sticking off in strange fuzzy angles. My tongue and teeth pull my lips into all kinds of ugly expressions of concentration.  My feet hate the floor and I hunch my back into a slinky slouch. Downcast eyes and a head that pivots left. down. right. further right. left again.  Like some kind of giant confused chicken.  I am an unkempt and ugly girl but a passionate one, completely consumed and blind to the world and myself.  (And I lived happily ever after, the end.)

Who else is entirely unselfconscious?  Playing children, maybe.  Is it merely concentration?  Do scientists doing their science look like absurd rounded-back squishy-faced chickens?  In some way do they put the same investment of personality and style into their work as an artist does, even if interpretation would be obtuse?

As soon as I put down the pen the reality that I exist comes tumbling back to me.  This is the trouble with it. And then I think my god, I must have looked quite ugly and strange. And I think what is this thing I’ve created? And I suspect that it must look ugly and strange as well. This spiral into self doubt has been well described by friends of mine, it appears to be nearly universal although poorly understood by artists, it’s passed off as the occupational crazy.  But I think I’ve figured it out.  It’s the rediscovery of self, the surfacing from unselfconsciousness, and the realization of how totally dorky unselfconsciousness is.

I think I read that Picasso would paint for days in a frenzy and then pass out into a deep sleep when exhaustion finally caught up with him. His wife had to sneak into the room and steal the paintings away so they would be out of his reach, because when he woke up and discovered himself he would destroy all of the work he had done.

Another artist friend, when I was young and dreaming of making a living with my meager talents, explained to me that there was no point pursuing commercial art if I loved the product and not the process. That this notion of finding it difficult to part with the work itself was unproductive and self absorbed.  Serious art, he said, is in the process of making it. Once it’s done you could just throw it away. Selling it is just more practical, but the principle is the same. This is embracing the dorky unselfconsciousness.   This is comfort with the failure that hits you like a bucket of cold water, when you suddenly become aware of every flaw that others will see and probably the ones they won’t.  It’s also the reason to start over and make another one.  And the reason to push harder to become better, weird faces and chicken twitches be damned.

From my blog