Is this the secret to a successful creative life?

This week I finished a painting and immediately found myself slightly lost again. This always happens to me.

When I’m deeply inside a painting, I feel completely absorbed. I know where I’m heading when I walk into the studio, and I can work for hours at a time. Even if the painting is difficult, there is still a sense of momentum because something is already alive and moving.

But once a painting finishes, there’s suddenly a strange emptiness.

So, I finished my latest painting on Monday, and by Tuesday I was back in the void. I wandered around making false starts. I looked through photographs without feeling anything much. I started one piece and abandoned it almost immediately because it just wasn't speaking to me.

Then eventually, towards the end of the week, I found a photograph that resonated enough for me to begin.

It’s a complicated image with five children in it and in the early stages I honestly couldn’t tell if it was going to work. Everything felt awkward and flat. I was just trying to get shapes in roughly the right places while quietly suspecting I might be chasing another dead end.

And then it happened - one of the children suddenly started to come alive.

See the little boy second from the right? He suddenly feels real to me. Now there are layers and layers to go. This likeness will come and go as I add more paint and charcoal and soft pastel. Who knows what he will look like a week from now. But none of that matters because once he appeared, everything changed.

I can’t explain this properly, but there comes a point in certain paintings where at least one of the subjects begins to have a little presence or personality. And from that moment onwards, the whole experience shifts. Suddenly the painting becomes interesting because there is someone there to respond to.

Exactly the same thing happened last week while I was working on a new course for Art Tribe.

I’m creating a series of modules that distil everything I feel I’ve learned about painting over the years and I’ve found the process surprisingly similar to making paintings. The early stages feel amorphous and uncertain. I circle ideas for ages. I make false starts. I move things around. I wonder if any of it is coherent.

Then suddenly, one module reveals itself properly and I can feel the shape of it. This week module three finally clicked into place and once that happened, making the videos became joyful. The ideas started connecting naturally and I could feel momentum building again.

Now I’m back in that uncertain place with the final modules, waiting for them to reveal themselves too. I am not worried because I know that it will happen - all I have to do is get started and then allow everything to take shape in its own good time.

I think creativity has always worked this way for me. 

I never begin with certainty. I begin with fragments, instinct, vague feelings, disconnected thoughts, and the uncomfortable suspicion that I might have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.

Then eventually, if I stay with it long enough, something starts breathing, and once that happens, the work carries me forwards.

Perhaps this is the key ingredient for a successful creative life - perhaps creativity is just the ability to keep taking big leaps into the unknown and trusting that things will come clear as we go?

I certainly know it's the key for me :)