Now More Than Ever - Rio Grande

journal of the pmc guild
CREATIVITY
Bob Keyes
We’re all familiar with the helpless feeling. We sit at our bench, fiddling
with tools; our minds turn over ideas, but nothing sticks and the ideas
fade away. Creativity can be fleeting. One minute it’s there and you feel
like you’re on an endless roll. But then it’s gone and no matter how hard
you try, you can’t seem to find the spark that ignites the next body of
work, perhaps unable even to work variations on a piece that you’ve made
before.
It’s called a creativity block, and it happens to the best of us, professionals
and amateurs alike. The question is, how do you move the block or
effectively navigate around it? Are there devices, or tricks, that are useful
in getting back to being productive? That’s a loaded question, because
there is no right or single answer. The answer is different for each individual
artist. Some people, when they run up against a block, sit and stare
at the studio walls until they figure it out. Others might go for a walk.
We put the question to a group of five artists who gathered in mid-
March in Portland, Maine. These five women, all friends, came together
in at one friend’s studio for three days to exchange ideas, engage in
conversation and work alongside each other. Their goal was not necessarily
to create, and in fact none of the women expressed a goal of leaving
with finished work. Instead, they were simply seeking a shared experience
outside their comfort zone in an attempt to freshen their perspective and
broaden their creative vocabulary.
All the women have taken workshops in PMC and are familiar with
the clay, but this gathering had nothing to do with metal clay. Instead,
they came together to experiment with encaustics, or hot wax painting, a
medium they were all familiar with, but knew little about. Their material of
choice was less important than the lessons and advice they shared about
creativity and visual thinking. For them, the gathering was an effort to
grow and evolve as artists and individuals, giving each person another tool
to use when confronted with a block.
“There’s almost always a good reason why you are blocked,” said
Nancy Moore Bess, a basketmaker from Massachusetts. “It could be stress
at home or at work. It could be health issues, or a distraction of some kind.
They’re all very good reasons.”
“You have to have a talk with yourself,” added Lissa Hunter, who
hosted the gathering. “What is it? It might be that you just did a big body
of work and you have what I call ‘post-artem depression.’ You spent it all,
and you can’t do it again. So you have to say, ‘This is what it is. I’ve seen it
before. I have felt it before.’”
This gathering was about taking the time to try something unfamiliar
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