Are you making this mistake?

One of the most extraordinary gifts an artist can receive isn’t a gallery invitation or a glowing review. It’s a question. A fresh, pressing, puzzling question.

That moment when you feel the tug of something you don’t understand—that’s the spark. The trouble is, many newer artists don’t like to live in that uncomfortable space of not knowing.

They want answers fast, and so they ask other people: how do I do x? or what's the best way to ...?"
 
But here’s the problem: the whole point of art-making is to work it out yourself. The search is the process. It's quite literally our job to work out answers to questions we invented for ourselves!

If we try to jump to a result, we miss the richness of the experience. And by the way, we are also left dissatisfied with whatever we make.  That's because we skipped the real journey. We may have created a picture but we didn't make art and our soul craves the experience of making art. 

I learned this the hard way, after many attempts to skip the hard parts! Things are very different now. I don't rush to resolve  questions by asking for help - I lean into them. I make them central to my life and I welcome the uncertainty.

This has been on my mind this week, as I recently embarked on a new series of paintings all focused on one core question. (If you are a member of my Art Tribe stay tuned for my upcoming series of videos, all about how I worked my way to my new question).

I thought it might be helpful to share how I approach a question that arises. How do I allow it to feed me? How do I spark off it?

So I sat down this morning and mafe this list. I hope it helps.

1. Follow the trails of others

Artists before us have asked all kinds of questions. I love to dive into their writings, their interviews, and even their journals to see what I can learn. I am interested in what obsessions they followed, and what contradictions they wrestled with. Sometimes, I find their questions echo my own. Other times, their curiosities nudge me into directions I hadn’t considered.

To do this I watch a lot of old Youtube documentaries and I also collect art books.

2. Mindmap the territory

I take the question and sprawl it across a page. I draw arrows, connections, and words that pop into my head. I don’t worry about neatness - my mindmaps are messy and alive. Mindmapping is a way of making my thinking visible to myself, and it often reveals unexpected pathways.

3. Play with materials

I try to let my hands respond before my head does. I pick up the brush, or pen, or crayon and let the question sit quietly in the background while I follow urges and detours. I remind myself that I don’t need to solve anything. I truly believe that the body knows more than the mind and this is one way of accessing that knowledge.

4. Sow many seeds

In his book The Creative Act, Rick Rubin writes about sowing seeds without judgment. He suggests trying many small beginnings.  Some will wither and some will grow - you don’t need to push any one of them into being the right one. The point is to create a fertile environment where questions can sprout into work naturally.

5. Sit with the discomfort

This is the hardest one for me. I work hard to allowing myself to not know. To feel the question tugging at me, unresolved, because that’s where growth happens. If we can resist the urge to close the loop too quickly, we leave room for surprise.

6. Talk around it, not about it

Instead of asking others for answers, try talking about your question sideways. Share your confusion, your curiosity, without expecting anyone to hand you a solution. Sometimes the act of describing the shape of your not-knowing helps you see what’s really at stake. I find this really helpful.

The truth is, the questions are the art. They are the thing we return to again and again. The answers—if they come at all—are temporary. They lead only to more questions. That’s the beauty of it.

So next time a question arises in your work, resist the temptation to outsource it. Stay with it. Read, map, play, sow, sit. Let the question be your companion for as long as it needs to be.

Because in the end, we don’t need to know everything. We just need to stay open to what the question is asking of us.