No major updates this time, only musings from the last little while on perfectionism, art-making, and the rhythms of life.
The last few months have been a whirlwind. To be completely honest, drawing has proven to be incredibly challenging for many reasons. That didn’t stop me from completing several drawings and doing my darnedest to keep up with work, but it wasn’t near as much as I’d have liked, and the catch-up begins.
I left home mid April for tour with Wormwitch, played some shows across Europe and the UK, then immediately upon arriving back in Canada went South to Portland to make a record.
I arrived back at my hermitage a few days ago to find the barren forests I left behind exploding with summery fervor. As it always is with long stretches on the road, returning home is a bit surreal, while the experiences and lessons of the previous months gradually yield their fruits.
My ongoing battle against perfectionism and the fear of creation has evolved from mere survival to parleying terms with the ego itself, and I think this is really what it all boils down to. I feel that I’ve arrived at a critical moment, where the dead weight of the past can be shaken off and met face-to-face, not to be slain, or denied, but integrated completely. In previous posts I’ve called for collaboration with chaos and a good-faith orientation towards Fate. This is all related.
Having spent the winter intermittently entombed in snow and isolated with my demons, I emerged hungrily from chthonic introspection to find the waking earth, and threw myself into it. When it came time to step out the door and into the unknown, I knew instinctively that what I truly needed was the exorcism of tour.
I can’t recall if I’ve ever stated it explicitly anywhere, but for many years I’ve struggled with immense self doubt and even outright hatred of my own work, and the pressure — self-imposed — to meet an impossible standard, and the fear of becoming totally irrelevant, or that I never had anything of value to offer in the first place. The fear of having been delusional, of having tricked everyone, by hiding my lack of skill or ideas. Naturally, this is very detrimental to progress… Having good habits with drawing is important, and the right attitude is important, but there are some battles that can’t be side-stepped with a clever routine.
The desire to be perfect can stem from many different places, but I’d argue it always comes back to fear. For me its been fear of confirming a cruel and hateful vision of myself inherited during adverse events in my childhood. The source of much self-sabotage and difficulty. In defense, one might nurture a super-inflated ego as armour, and in vain seek never to show oneself the limits of their capability, allowing said limits to remain fantasy, and frustrate meeting them at all costs, for safety.
The things I’ve made in my purest moments have been experimental in nature, and typically expressive, or seeking to make sense of huge emotions, or to make contact with myth. But this has been rare, and typical more often of my earlier drawings. Almost all of my work from the past couple years is corrupted by perfectionism, the Armour of Ego, and to that end — vanity.
I find it both intriguing and alarming to view perfectionism in the light of vanity. Intriguing in that it becomes easier to reject, somehow despicable. And alarming, like a hideous parasite hitherto unseen.
I’ve largely managed to turn a new leaf on drawing over the past weeks, and I hope to resume more frequent updates here as work in earnest recommences.
I’ll leave you with a passage of Nietzsche which has proven instrumental in helping me to synthesize the lessons of the season. It appeared yesterday morning in synchronistic fashion — only once I had returned and could fully appreciate it.
The Gay Science — 87: Of the Vanity of the Artists
”I believe artists often do not know what they can do best, because they are too vain, and have set their minds on something grander than those seemingly little plants which are able to grow to true perfection in their soil, as something new, rare and beautiful. They thoughtlessly underestimate the ultimate worth of their own garden and vineyard and their love is not equal to their insight. Here is a musician, who, more than any musician, has his mastery in finding the tones from the realm of suffering, oppressed, tortured souls, and who can even make dumb beasts speak. No one is his equal in the colours of late autumn, in the indescribably moving happiness of a final, all too final and all too brief enjoyment; he knows the tones for those mysterious midnights of the soul when cause and effect seem out of joint, and at any moment something may emerge ‘out of nothing’. He draws most successfully from the dregs of human happiness, from its drained goblet as it were, where, for better or for worse, the bitterest and most distasteful drops have finally mingled with the sweetest. He knows that weary shuffling of the soul which can no longer leap or fly, indeed, which can no longer even walk; he has the shy glance of secret pain, of understanding without comfort, of farewells without confessions; indeed, as the Orpheus of all secret misery, he is greater than anyone; and he has added much to art which was hitherto inexpressible and which even seemed unworthy of art, and which words in particular could only chase away and not grasp — those recesses of the soul which are quite small, even microscopic; oh yes, he is the master of the quite small. But he does not want to be! His character loves to paint daring frescoes on great walls! It entirely escapes him that his spirit has different taste and inclination, and prefers to sit quietly in the corners of collapsed houses — there, concealed, concealed even from himself, he paints his authentic masterpieces, all of which are very short, often only one measure long — because only there does he become wholly good, great and perfect, there and perhaps there alone.But he does not know it! He is too vain to know it.”