It's often the case for artists that identity and practice, that our sense of self and purpose in life are the very same thing. One just doesn't do art, one is an artist. So it is for me: I am what I do and I do what I am. I am my art and my art is me. That means creating my art isn't just a passion, a job, a joy, a pastime, a pursuit, or even a routine—it's me being alive. It's as natural and necessary to me as breathing, and so to stop is to literally stop living, to cease being me. This is both a blessing and a curse. Making a living at what reaffirms who I am is wondrous beyond words and I'm grateful every day!
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
Joseph Campbell
But it also means that the very essence of my being can be vulnerable to circumstance. If life decides to get between me and my ability to create art then, I'm faced with a crisis well beyond missing work. This being so, the vacant detachment imposed by depression not only threatened what I am but who I am as well…a frightening proposition. A rescue mission had to be launched post haste, to save not only my productivity but my personality too. But in deploying that salvage operation, I was stunned to excavate rediscovered treasures almost forgotten in the dark deep of myself. Bringing them up from the brooding depths, I never suspected how these bygone imaginings would breathe new life into me and conspire to save me from drowning in that abyss of ambivalence.
So in a roundabout way, that melancholy drudgery, that yawning bleakness did offer a great gift. And though wrapped in howling indifference and topped with a soul–sucking bow, it was a great gift all the same. Depression may not be the best wrapper of presents, but…hey…it tries. And by "gift" I mean this: I realized that I'd been working almost exclusively in equine realism for about thirty–seven years. This isn't so incredulous once you realize that time, effort, dedication, and sacrifice in freakishly large quantities are necessary for this demanding art form. And I've relished every moment! The single–subject and focus isn't a limitation in my opinion, but an enthralling challenge. To explore the possibilities and interpret variations has truly tested my mettle each time I've touched tool to clay, and has only served to intensify its appeal.
But still…that's a long time to be single–minded about anything! When I was my typical crazy–busy self, I was probably too distracted by all the goings–on to realize my creativity had developed an itch—one that would need a pretty good scratch too boot. There's nothing quite like inertia to pinpoint the deficiencies in one's trajectory. Slowly becoming aware of a restlessness in my creativity then, I diagnosed a need to be wanton again, to wallow in a kind of innocence found only in unfettered imagination. Strange that in the midst of spirit–snuffing insouciance, one last little spark would want to detonate itself into a thermonuclear bomb of emotion!
So there I was, armed with a sizable mental library of anatomical rules accumulated over nearly four decades of intent study—and now my insides wanted to pitch it all into the wind?! What gives? Did my creativity want to expand on familiar themes because of its expanded appreciation for the subject? Hmmm…could be! Then maybe my insides pined for this kind of exploration as a way to complement and puzzle over those learned for realism? Quite possibly! And just what was this new compulsion for artistic abandon in the studio? Where the holy heck was that coming from? As I peeled back the smothering layers of depression, there in the gooey amorphic center, grinnin' back at me like a cheeky Cheshire Cat, was the repressed need for…
Play. Play? Yes—PLAY. Whoa! How wild! OK, then—play! Ta-da!
Apparently I'd been creating "by the book" for so long, my creativity simply wanted an opportunity to concoct new rules, or even play with existing ones in new ways. But this would be risky! I took pride in pushing my skills in the accuracy department, in duplicating real life as closely as possible, and my work was known for this careful attention to technical detail. And now my guts wanted to just make stuff up?! What?! My production schedule was in total chaos, too, no thanks to the apathy induced by depression. So the wad of existing work that was waiting for my attention was obviously far more pressing, right? Only now my creativity wanted to switch gears to—from this perspective—waste time?! Perish the thought—NO! Absolutely NOT—no no NO! Shut up little spark! Was it out of its mind?! (Don't answer that!)
But…but…perhaps there was method to this madness, a lunatic wisdom. Hmm. See, those two gremlins—risk and backlog—were highly skilled at spinning a pointed and powerful guilt–trip each and every time the urge to focus on something different sprung up. So "play" just didn't seem justified—so it wasn't and I didn't. And I'm a working artist too, darn it! It's unacceptable that my drive could be so capricious and easily compromised. I should just get down to work, efficiently and effectively, right? Buck up, Mink! Geez.
Yet I had to admit that the more I forced the "real" work, the more frustrated I became. Few things turned out as desired, and what was once effortless and joyful was now browbeaten toil. I found myself uncharacteristically rationalizing more and more, and so the studio sat empty and Minkless more and more each week. Bit by bit then, that natural impulse to continue creating simply evaporated. Depression had made creating art hard enough, but then having to battle these self–inflicted guilt–trips of "I shoulds" made for a kind of emotional agony. It's so true that only we know how to most cruelly torture ourselves.
Smoosh that whole seething mess together and what have we got? Yep…a terrible negative feedback loop. One that was becoming ever more entrenched and powerful every day, too, and that's bad bad juju for a working artist. And if that wasn't enough, being attached to my identity and sense of purpose also meant that I faced some rather unwelcome and unsettling deeply personal implications. I became desperate. Frantic, really. The life I saw before me was without art—was without me being me—and it was unfathomable. How do you deal with a future so unwanted and unlike you, but with you still stuck inside it? I didn't want to be a prisoner in my own life! And I certainly didn't want to be that kind of broken person for my family and friends either!
Things eventually reached critical mass, a kind of fork in the road. Going absolutely nowhere, I was stalled out with real work on one road and preventative guilt–trips rallied a gauntlet on the other. Wounded, frightened, despairing and bewildered, another meltdown was imminent. Then outta nowhere some forgotten advice popped into my head, neatly summed up thusly…
Action is the antidote to despair.
Joan Baez
When stuck, moving in any direction is—by definition—being unstuck. If my insides simply refused to create real work then it was the guilt–trips that had to crumble. So I began to wonder…what was my psyche trying to tell me all this time? And why had I deafened myself to it? Had I become so accustomed to internal mental combat that I simply forgot how to stop fighting? Rather than swallow play as frivolous excess perhaps I should see it instead as the storied "spoonful of sugar"? As therapy? So would indulging play prime my parched creative pump? If play really was rehabilitation, would it regenerate and release that torrential, unstoppable gush of possessed creativity so typical of my drive before depression? Or would it backfire catastrophically to sink me forever in an endless ocean of hopeless despair? Would it finally and totally break me? How the heck did I get to this point?! How did I become so afraid?! Why did I doubt myself, and so blithely? And when did I become so distrustful of the one thing I'd always been most certain about—making art?! BAH! That's not me whatsoever! Even so, I had to move.
So I gathered myself up, took a deep breath, riled the maniac minkie moxie that served me so well in life…then looking it square in the eyes, I steeled myself and gave that smug, disapproving, overbearing conscience The Bird. Take that you putz! GET OUT! And clean the dirt behind you! So I metaphorically tossed my red curls, spun around and sauntered back to creativity's waiting, warm arms, feverishly and rebelliously embracing the whole crazy idea of play. Play play PLAY!
Nothing happens until something moves.
Albert Einstein
Then a curious thing happened: the moment I allowed myself to embrace this idea, to give myself permission to play, something shifted, clicked on and loudly sputtered to life—rusty, smoking, grinding and clanking at first then…FLASH! BANG! Clink clink clink *POP* WHHHHRRRRRRRRR…my creativity and enthusiasm snapped into synch and in one mad instant, catalyzed an explosion of superheated liberation, generating a massive, supersonic shockwave of eager, joyful, shining fervor that instantly leveled and vaporized the diseased, gnarled landscape of depression. For a moment I was blinded. I actually physically felt a cool, calming wash in my brain (???) then all of a sudden, clear as day, I opened my eyes and knew exactly what to play with…
As a girl I spent hours filling my sketchbooks with horses and ponies, painstakingly drawn with as much technical accuracy I could muster in those tender years—which was…well, pretty darned lousy, to be honest. But we all gotta start somewhere! Created alongside these spirited steeds, however, were teeming herds of imagined animals—fantastical creatures of all kinds. Scales, horns, feathers, claws, antlers, fins…these beasts evolved within a creative landscape governed only by my boundless, youthful imagination.
So now that I was finally listening to my creativity, I realized that these bizarre creatures tickled and amused different parts of my creativity, exercising bits that were equally and uniquely important for my creative well–being. It dawned on me then that these wild things could represent different aspects of my creative drive, different totems in a way, and they needed attention, too. In a sense, they were spawned in my depths whereas my equine art was about diving into the depths of another.
