Hacking the Zone: 1

GETTING TO THE INVISIBLE OF CREATIVITY

jr-korpa-FiFiVf1xHtk-unsplash, digital edit-Rhaine

The ability to look deeply is the root of creativity. To see past the ordinary and mundane and get to what might otherwise be invisible. Rick Rubin

Creativity is as big as the universe. There are facets, layers, tentacles, theories, and the science behind both the art and the state of being creative. There are the tangible, visible, audible reminders – the evidence that something happened. There is the invisible that feeds into a creative practice that we may or may not be aware of. And there are as many ways to enhance, nurture, cultivate, and produce a creative outflow as there are ways to eat an apple. There are also an array of theories, methods, and steps to getting unblocked, to reestablish creativity, to get back to a flow, the zone, we once knew. To some creativity is how they make a living. To others it manifests in hobbies and living more deeply. To me it’s blood.

What I once knew, living a creative life, stopped and I’ve been on a journey to resuscitate it for a chunk of my adult life now – since 1997. I can remember the exact year because that was the year I left my first marriage. It was the year when I realized that painting portraits, as I once had known it, was dead.

I am reading Rick Rubin’s, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, which is a trove of new insights that connect the dots from the spiritual, to what it means to be human, and coexist within the energies of creativity. Rick tells us, “As humans – everyone is creative”.

Within the soup of culture, if we look for it, we can see how culture can affect artists and writers. What works for one person may be a distraction for another which includes the environment and spaces we live in. The sources one draws upon are also unique to each of us.

photo credit (left) Nikolas Muray; (right) unknown, digital edit-Rhaine

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter best known for her heterogeneous and brilliantly-colored self-portraits. Her work delt with themes of identity, feminism, LBGTQ representation, love, pain, the human body, and death. She drew strength and creativity from the struggles, both physical and emotional, in her personal life.

I don’t paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality. Frida Kahlo

photo credit (photographer unknown)

Andy Warhol, American visual artist, film director and producer was said to create with a television, radio, and record player all on simultaneously.

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(left) Photographer unknown) (right) A young Eminem in 1999. Photo: Catherine McGann/Getty), digital edit-Rhaine

Eminem, American rapper and songwriter prefers the noise of a single TV set as a backdrop for writing.

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(left) Black and white photographer unknown. (right) Color image is from the short film Proustiana, The Cork Lined Room, digital edit-Rhaine.

Marcel Proust, French novelist, literary critic, and essayist lined his walls with sound-absorbing cork, closed the drapes, and wore earplugs. Black and white image, photographer unknown.

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Photogrphaer unknown, (right) Kafka diary entry, digital montage by Rhaine

Franz Kafka, Czech novelist and writer took his need for silence to an extreme – “not like a hermit,” he once said, but “like a dead man.”

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Photo credit: Michael Holtz

Francis Bacon, born in Dublin, Ireland (1909), found inspiration in the chaos of his studio which he compared to his mind. It is said that his images arrive straight through the nervous system hijacking the soul.

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Me, painting circa 1990. Photo credit, my daughter, Keely Heissinger.

There is no wrong way. There is only your way. Rick Rubin

In my own life, I find that solitude and mindfulness are free, easy ways to add to an evolving creative practice. There is also the “letting go” piece that I’ve had to wrestle with. Letting go of the possibility to not ever being able to paint like I once did but also to remain hopeful that perhaps things will evolve into other ventures and projects I had never imagined.

I would love to hear what works or doesn’t work for you in being creative, cultivating a creative practice, or weaving creativity into the fabric of life.

I’ll leave the light on,