Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you
grow up. - Pablo Picasso
Picasso On Intuition
--by Maria Popova, syndicated from brainpickings.org, Sep 29, 2014
“To
know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing.”
“Inspiration
is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work,” painter Chuck Close memorably
scoffed. “Show
up, show up, show up,” novelist
Isabelle Allende echoed in her advice to aspiring writers,“and
after a while the muse shows up, too.” Legendary composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
put it similarly in an 1878 letter to his benefactress: “A
self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in
the mood.” Indeed, this notion
that creativity and fruitful ideas come not from the passive resignation to a
muse but from the active application of work ethic — or discipline,
something the late and great Massimo Vignelli advocated for as the
engine of creative work — is
something legions of creative luminaries have articulated over the ages,
alongside the parallel inquiry of where
ideas come from. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most succinct and elegant
articulation comes from one of the greatest artists of all time.
This
was one of the questions the famed Hungarian photographer Brassaï posed to Pablo
Picasso over the course of their
30-year-long interview series, collected in Conversations
with Picasso (public
library) — the same superb 1964 volume that gave us Picasso on success
and why you should never compromise creatively. When Brassaï asks whether
the painter’s ideas come to him “by chance or by design,” Picasso slips in some
sidewise wisdom on the
tyranny of “creative block” and
responds:
I don’t have a clue. Ideas are simply starting points. I can rarely set them down as they come to my mind. As soon as I start to work, others well up in my pen. To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing… When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.
To
further illustrate this notion that the best creative work happens when the
rational, self-editing mind gets out of the way of the intuitive inclination —
something Ray Bradbury articulated
beautifully in a 1974 interview —
Picasso offers an illustrative example. Despite being both a professional
admirer and a personal friend of Matisse’s, he cites the painter’s notoriously
methodical creative process as a betrayal of this notion that an artist should
honor his or her initial creative intuition:
Matisse does a drawing, then he recopies it. He recopies it five times, ten times, each time with cleaner lines. He is persuaded that the last one, the most spare, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and yet, usually it’s the first. When it comes to drawing, nothing is better than the first sketch.Conversations with Picasso is an enormously rewarding read in its entirety. Complement this particular extract with a five-step “technique for producing ideas” from 1939, then revisit David Lynch on where ideas come from and some thoughts on the subject from Neil Gaiman.
Maria
Popova is a cultural curator and
curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Design
Observer, and is
the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings (which offers a freeweekly
newsletter).
Be The Change: We are more
creative than we think. This week look for inspiration -- to write or create in
other ways -- from another part of yourself.
