The Astonished Apple - Eric Maisel

This post is the second of a series of three articles on "Making Meaning" or "Working Deeply" for artists by writer and creativity coach, Eric Maisel. The series was originally published in his Creativity Newsletter. This one was published December 11, 2005 in Creativity Newsletter # 121.

At the core of a creative act like painting or sculpting is the effort to make meaning (and not beautiful objects or money). We are very happy if we make objects we like and if we make money, but what we are really after as we create is the experience of making our life feel meaningful. Nowhere is the intersection of meaning-making and individual personality played out more idiosyncratically and more interestingly than in an artist’s choice of subject matter and his or her handling of subject matter.

Why do you choose the subject matter you choose? Why do you handle that subject matter in your particular way? Say that you put ten artists in a room—maybe Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Cassatt, Cezanne, Picasso, O’Keeffe, Pollock, Rothko, Tamara de Lempicka, and you—and said, “Paint an apple or whatever ‘painting an apple’ brings to mind.” We know the outcome: ten very different paintings, some of which might include objects that looked like apples, some of which might include images that somehow reminded us of apples, and some of which would include nothing apple-like at all.

Cezanne said, “With an apple I will astonish Paris!” What he meant was, “Using an ordinary apple as my starting point, a subject painted a million times before, I will make some new meaning because of my artistic vision, my facility with a brush, and my personal response to nature.” That is only a part of the story, however. What Cezanne could only know much less well—what each of us can only know in a shadowy, hazy way—are the historical, cultural, and psychological forces at play in a Cezanne (or ourselves) that provoked a given choice and a particular way of handling that choice.

Every painting is its own kind of mystery because it represents what the artist thinks she is doing and also what the artist can’t know that she is doing. In a real sense subject matter is never a completely conscious decision, because processes go on in the brain that the brain can’t stand apart from and witness. It is not possible to know if a trip to see glaciers last year caused you to paint this apple this way, so that we feel unbearable stillness as we view it, or whether it was both glacier-visiting and growing up in snow country, or nothing of the sort. We, the observer, can’t know—and you, the painter, can’t know either.

There are certain profound psychological consequences of not knowing where our subject matter comes from and why we are handling it exactly as we are handling it. The most important one is that we can always doubt the result. We look at the thing we’ve just made and, because it has arisen in part knowingly but in part mysteriously, we are apt to wonder, “Why did I make that?” On good days we answer that question with a hearty, “Just because!”, smile, and continue on our way. But on bad days we are pulled to answer, “I don’t know—and it may have been a complete mistake!”

If you have two pennies to the left and two pennies to the right, you are pretty sure that you have four pennies altogether. There is nothing very thrilling about that news, but at least there is nothing much to doubt. If, however, you’ve been painting desert landscapes, figurative nudes, optical paintings, monochromes, or anything else under the sun, there may be much to thrill you in the process and in the execution but also much to doubt. The answer we wish we could provide when a doubt arises is, “I have chosen this because I have thought the matter through and I know for certain that this is my surest way to make meaning.” The only answer we are entitled to provide, however, is the following absurd and provisional one: “I’m not exactly sure, but I hope I’m on track.”

When your subject matter or your handling of your subject matter gets you down—when a doubt arises that must be addressed—the first thing you must do is surrender to the fact that, whatever you decide and however you decide, you remain in the territory of mystery. There may be good reasons for you to move from desert landscape to figurative nude or from figurative nude to desert landscape, but good reasons are not the same as transparent certainty. All you can do is choose, wish yourself well, and enter the next unknown.

The beauty of this reality is that, while we know less about the sources of our subject matter choices than we wish we knew, we are also freer to experiment, play with a hunch, and follow an enthusiasm. Gauguin remarked, in that ironic way of his, “I have known, everyone knows, everyone will continue to know, that two and two make four. But this irritates me; it quite upsets my way of thinking.” He was joking, of course, because he knew that he had no need to be irritated: in the artist’s world, nothing like the logic of math obtains. It is much more about love, guesswork, and pure adventure.

Do not get down on yourself when you start to doubt the rightness of your subject matter choices. There really is no way to be certain. Just do your honorable best to feel through what next steps you intend to take and endeavor to astonish at least yourself with your next amazing Macintosh, Gravenstein, or Golden Delicious.

© Eric Maisel, 2005. All rights reserved.

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You can subscribe to Eric Maisel’s Creativity Newsletter and learn about his creativity coaching trainings and workshops sessions on his website: http://www.ericmaisel.com/
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Eric Maisel is also the author of many books on creativity. Information about them is available: http://www.ericmaisel.com/store/index.html
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A listing of creativity books by other authors recommended by Eric Maisel is available:http://www.ericmaisel.com/resources/library.html