Shifting and Sifting

Today on my daily hike I thought about the idea of what it is to shift as an artist. The weather here is extremely brisk (15 degrees) and the wind was fiercely moving across last night’s snow making ripples and dunes and erasing my footsteps almost as soon as I made them. I’ve begun the arduous (and sometimes joyful) task of looking through all the work I’ve done at the residencies I’ve attended this year and I’ve come to a conclusion: sometimes we write the same poem twenty different ways. It feels different when we are producing it, but when in the editing phase we discover, to our creative horror, that the piece has similar language, rhythm, and/or tone.

If we, as artists, are doing our work every day, plugging away at an idea or theme, what prevents this from happening? In other words, how can we shift into new territory without losing our voices? Picasso, of course, did intentional shifts. To me he had both skill and immense faith. And, I’m sure to some degree, he was not as afraid of failure as the rest of us. I don’t mean complete failure either (like no one will ever publish your work or buy your paintings again), I’m talking about leaving that space where we are praised and embraced as artists. A musician friend recently told me that loads of his community come to his gigs when he plays with his old band but hardly anyone shows up for the single and duo performances he does recently—and this is the creative work that thrills him, that he wants to share. His own shift as an artist has taken place, but upon leaving the familiar, he finds no one wants to join him there. And therein lies the fear we all have as artists. The truth is we can be the artist who just churns out the same stuff that we always have, floating along in our happy bubble of comfort (a visual artist friend talks about this often with me because she has a colleague that makes three times the money she does because he keeps cranking out the same landscape paintings that sell well) or we can stretch ourselves creatively. Because if we don’t, if we don’t run to the edge of the cliff and look off with the intention of falling into the swollen river below, what are we doing? Or, rather, what are we missing?

Creative shifts can be terrifying, as I’m discovering with my own work at the moment. But I keep thinking that a few months of floundering around in the rapids is worth the chance to see a new shore. Scientists spend years, sometimes their entire careers, in a place of failure. They are on one path and must radically shift their experiments, thoughts, etc. to get to a new place and a possible answer. If we approach our creative lives in the same way we might stop fearing what will be left behind and instead be awed by what at last has a chance to breathe and grow strong.