I saw it first hand!

There are all kinds of things we need to learn as artists. We need to understand how to choose and mix colours and we need to know how to create effective compositions. We need to know how to use our mediums, and how to choose the tools we work with. If we paint representationally, we need to understand our subject, and if we paint abstractly we need to understand ourselves.

But more than any of that, I feel we need to learn the one thing I talk about more than any other ... how to let go of control. We need to learn to allow our art to come through us, rather than from us, and that can be extremely tricky.

By the way, I am not just talking to abstract painters - this applies to representational painters and ceramicists and writers and actors and musicians as well. The process of intuitive abstract painting is perhaps an extreme example, but in all forms of art, human beings can kill their creativity by trying to control it.

I saw this first-hand yesterday, as I attended a workshop run by another artist. She works in a very intuitive way with collage and paint, and she was sharing her process with us. Many people were able to let go and have fun, but for some it was a real challenge.

"I like to plan," one person said. 

"I'm a very controlled and methodical person," said another, "so  this makes me very uncomfortable."

Yet by the end of class, every person had made something they couldn't have imagined at the beginning. Most of the work was exciting and alive and it had all emerged without any pre-planning or step-by-step process.

This works because our creativity is far more expansive than our limited mind. Our mind is where the planning happens, but it can only plan based on what it already knows. So its creations will always be restricted and limited by existing knowledge.

But outside of that limited little world there are vast expanses of unexplored creativity. We are all capable of so much more than we imagine. Once you understand this, you can find ways to create an environment and a process that allows your creativity to flourish.

And when you do this, magic starts to happen. You might start a portrait of a friend and then watch as it morphs into a moving, beautiful painting of a stranger (rather than trying to wrestle a likeness). You may begin a landscape painting and then realise that you want to move the trees to a different spot and completely ignore the barn in the middle of the field - or that you want to turn it upside down and paint an abstract. You might paint a pink cow or change your planned dishes into cups.

When you work this way, your art is coming through you from somewhere else. You are simply the conduit. And this means there's no need to be perfect and no requirement to get anything right. There is simply the requirement to stay open to whatever comes through. 

It is not easy to reach this way of working - and it requires constant practice as we all slip back into "control mode" from time to time, but if you can find a way to start, you will be amazed to find what can happen.