4-3-2-1
Books about creativity and re-enchantment, visiting famous studios, invisible somethings, and Phyllida Barlow
Hello everyone! This week I’m back with 4-3-2-1, a monthly gathering of ideas, resources, and inspiration for your week—some reading, some exploring, some block busting, some questioning…
4 Interesting Things
Rick Rubin’s book, “The Creative Act: A Way of Seeing” is everywhere right now and worth putting in your reading pile. Mapping the intangible and intuitive range of the creative process, it is full of generosity and wonder. Some overlap with Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Big Magic” from 2016.
Speaking of wonder, I just finished Katherine May’s new book, “Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age”, and it was like taking a deep grounding breath. Her prose has a poetic specificity that made me stop and re-read many passages just for the pleasure of it. I’m currently working on a project about wildfire in western forests, and I marked this passage where she writes about experiencing the “deep terrain” of the forest:
“Bring questions into this space and you will receive a reply, though not an answer. Deep terrain offers up multiplicity, forked paths, symbolic meaning. It schools you in compromise, in shifting interpretation. It will mute your rationality and make you believe in magic.”
In my last newsletter I wrote about how much I like seeing other artist’s work spaces during open studios tours, but have you ever visited a famous artist’s studio? I haven’t but this list and this one too make me want to plan some trips!
Very helpful: How to Solve a Creative Block via Mason Currey
3 Quotes About Creative Work
“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, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
“I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.” -Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
“We work because it’s a chain reaction, each subject leads to the next.” -Charles Eames
2 Questions
If you were to reduce your creative practice to three foundational pillars, what would they be?
All three quotes above share the subtext of something unseen moving through us into our work. What is your invisible “something” that you “tap into” and is expressed in your work?
1 Inspiring Practice
In March, the British sculptor and painter Phyllida Barlow passed. I was familiar with her work before but took the opportunity to do a deeper dive. Watching these videos, I was surprised by her late arrival to recognition and delighted by her warmth and dedication to process, by her generosity toward her studio assistants and the expansiveness of her vision. And my goodness, that huge studio!
“There’s a sort of method in the madness.” -Phyllida Barlow
Last year’s short profile from the BBC
“I quite like the long slow process of drawing, thinking about it, then moving to materials. Those thoughts in your head start to diminish and the thing in front of you gains momentum of its own.”
That’s it from me this week— please leave us a note in the comments, maybe some thoughts on the questions above? Have a great week!
i once visited the home studio of paul mccarthy in pasadena... don’t know if he is considered famous — certainly very well-known (particularly in germany and europe.) my visit was arranged by my friend jennifer who worked with him as a graduate student at ucla. she wanted to show him a 16mm film i had made, which included her performing movement studies for film camera. we met at his house for dinner. the studio was a long rectangular addition that you would enter from the living room, where we set up a projector. mccarthy cleared away some items so we could project the film onto his studio wall… what makes this studio visit especially memorable is that a few years later i was visiting new york city at a time the studio was also visiting… mccarthy had turned it into an artwork, constructing a box the the room’s exact dimensions and fixing the floor, ceiling, walls, and over 3000 pieces of the studio’s contents in place, turning the room on its side. i cannot even begin to articulate the sensations experienced in viewing this familiar space again, this time in an atrium adjacent to a madison avenue skyscraper, the wall we projected on, now the floor. https://www.publicartfund.org/exhibitions/view/the-box/
Hi Lisa,
I meant to say this a while ago: thank you so much for the content, the inspiration and the deep dive into things... your P+C letter came into my life in a moment (long moment) of melancholy and desperation. There is a huge gap between what I create and what I think I want to create. I embrace the struggle (Do I have a choice?...) Your letter is greatly appreciated!