Ideas arrive with silence oftentimes. My most recent epiphany came at the most inopportune moment. When I rolled over for the 5th time at 2 a.m.; I would have preferred to fall back asleep if given the choice. But instead, I ran down a thought detour and connected two good ideas that had been loitering all week to form a new, brilliant idea: how to fix my current painting.
Big Panel in Progress
Painting is often about problem solving, so you have to make notes when the ideas arrive – even in the middle of the night. They also like to intrude while you’re taking a shower (though they are more welcome than Norman Bates.) Why is it that when you’re trying to think of a solution, it doesn’t show its face, but try to go to sleep, and the creativity gets as rowdy as college kids on spring break?
Why? I’ll tell you my theory:
One reason is that when we are sleeping, driving, weeding or showering – we have exponentially fewer distractions. The responsibilities of daily living: preparing food, taking care of our shelter and comforts, calendar management and body maintenance require so much energy and attention. Our brains are pretty busy with daily rote tasks and distractions. My ‘monkey mind’ could convince me that all of this is more important than making art if I let it. It can create distractions right out of thin air!
Mental Distractions
Even right now, as I sit down to write this post, my mind wants to avoid bushwhacking my thoughts into some form of coherence. Miss monkey mind wants to take the paved freeway to nowhere and scroll social media. But mental distractions aren’t the only creative hazard.
Visual distractions are also at play. Just an innocent glance out the window and I see that the dogwood I love is about to bud out. And there’s a SQUIRREL! It’s no coincidence that some of my best painting ideas arrive when my eyes are closed! In fact, here’s a great way to conquer visual distractions: close your eyes!
When my eyes are closed, the images that come to my mind are often simpler, more powerful and more iconic than what I can sketch or paint. And with my eyes closed I can sometimes discover new paths or avenues of problem solving that I had totally overlooked but now seem obvious.
There are also auditory distractions to battle. For example, one thing I realized when our electricity was out: just having central heat produces noise. The sound of the forced air heat was missing when we were out of power for 10 days this winter. It is amazing how much better I slept when the heater wasn’t kicking on or off every 30 minutes.
And I loved how quiet the house felt in the day with only the occasional crackle or hiss of the fireplace. Television, drips, dishwasher, stereo, phone, traffic – noises that bring to mind other parts of our lives can distract from creative work.
Turn off the noise:
Turning off as much of the noise as possible can help conquer the audio distractions. Creating white noise: a dryer, water running, driving, or a fan can also help. In the studio I listen to music without lyrics to help me tune out other audio noise.
Painting near the ocean has the same effect. I’m looking forward to working onnew ocean paintings in my workshop at the Sitka Center! June 14-18 – we will be adding our treasures from walking the beach to small cold wax and oil paintings. Learn more on their website: https://www.sitkacenter.org/workshops/tide-lines-cold-wax-and-oil-collage-3
We’re just basically bathing in distraction day and night.
Sometimes it takes silence to create. Silence of the mind, visual silence and physical silence. Join me at the coast for a respite from all your distractions.
“I am silent now. It is not an empty silence. It is a natural silence. The silence of wind, of waves, of breath, of the beating of my heart. It is a space in my soul for being aware. It is a silence that listens, gently, taking notice. I can simply Be. I am the space within. I am the round sky and the firm earth. The waves of life wash through me, and the wind of the spirit cries in my heart.”
– Christin L. Weber, Finding Stone
Leave me a comment: How do you deal with distraction? And feel free to share this on your favorite social media or to send it on to an artistic friend! Thanks for reading.
Click on images below for the full view and take a peek at some of my other posts on Silence, below.
https://rutharmitage.com/connect-the-dots-quiet-constellations/
Washed Ashore
Cold Wax, Oil & Collage
Tides
Oil & Cold Wax with collage 9×12″
Limpet
Cold Wax and Oil on Panel with Found Objects
Sandbar
Oil & Cold Wax on panel 6”x12” – part of my new series called Tides – looking at the intersection of land and sea
Neskowin Inspiration
I agree that distractions are all around us—even in a pandemic when we’re not going places like we used to! We can get distracted right here at home with internet, zoom meetings etc. What works for me is carving out solid blocks of time to paint or think about my paintings during the day or early evening after dinner so that by the time I read a book before bed, I can’t keep my eyes open. It’s easy to GET to sleep, but I still seem to wake up at 3am and have trouble going back to sleep until 4:30am (I listen to bbc radio, as if *that* helps!). Alas, I rarely think about paintings at that hour–it’s more like the OTHER stuff of life that comes creeping into my brain then. Flashes of insight about our art come when they come, I suppose, and we have to just grab a hold of them (even at inconvenient times). I love your commission in progress–your client is going to be thrilled!
Thanks Liz,
I get the insomnia of life stuff interrupting my sleep too. I’d much rather have painting ideas, lol!
I’ve never understood artists who can work in a noisy studio with loud and raucous music blaring or studio mates all around. I need quiet. Even when taking a workshop I don’t like someone else’s music. And in my home studio, I tune it all out by using my headphones with quiet music filling my ears, drowning out traffic noise and my husband’s TV or phone conversations, while my mind wanders and my hands work.
Thanks, Jo! Music is a great cure for distractions.
Learning to meditate has helped me to be a more focused painter. One can almost never eliminate distractions. The most troublesome ones tend to be the ones that come from inside rather than outside. Thoughts of how other people will react to my painting, will I be able to sell it, something else I was supposed to do today, other random thoughts. Learning to notice these things without following them and instead returning to my painting is my goal. One can get better at this by practicing without negative self judgment.
Thanks, Hank! I need to work on my meditation skills. Like you, the worst distractions are internal for me!
Ruth, my yoga instructor is always asking us to listen to what is beyond the silence as we practice, especially during meditation. Recently he recommended a film for us: “The Sound of Metal”. It is a very poignant film about a musician who looses his hearing and the extremes he goes to to fix it only to revert back to the silence. There is so much to hear in the silence if you will only listen.
I’m going to have to look up this film! Thanks for your reply, Diane 🙂