artist’s way – Noelle Poulson

Hi all,

Long time no chat. As it turns out, there are certain things in life that suck the creative life force out of you pretty quickly. I have been in the thick of one of those things for the last month and a half and am happy to announce that I finally walked out the door and will never look back.

Hooray, huzzah and all the other happy, onomatopoetic sentiments one can muster!

This liberation has allowed my mental imagery to shift back to bursts of color, fanciful designs and long-shelved project concepts. One such whim is a series of Oman-based postcards I’ve had floating around in my head for quite some time. I saw visions of these over the summer, but, as is so often the case, when my vision is clearest my resistance is strongest.

My problem is that I’m not an artist. I mean I AM an artist, I have the soul of an artist, the inclinations of an artist, the desire to make art central to my life…but artists are just so so cool and talented, right?

I am NOT cool or talented.

I’ve talked about this before: it seems that making art is really about letting go of what we think we have to be in order to be an artist so we can just get on with making art.

Lessons learned are often revisited, it seems.

My resistance stems from the fact that, when presented with a fantastic image in my mind, my hand struggles to render it on the page. It’s a real battle, folks. I want so much to share what I’ve got in my head, but the only tools I can think to do it with seem to lock up and refuse to cooperate the minute I touch them. Woe is me.

Here’s where the letting go comes into play.

I won’t ever be a Rembrandt. I won’t ever draw still lifes with peaches so ripe you can smell them through the canvas. I won’t ever draw a dog that looks like anything but a pig.

But maybe I’m destined to draw the best damn pig ever. Maybe my style is abstraction, imperfection, essence as opposed to replication. Maybe that’s just who I am. Maybe that’s my thing, the way I share what’s in my head.

There are talented people in the world – incredibly amazingly talented people – and, rather than envy them, I would like to be proud of them, encourage them, support them, send people their way because they deserve to be found and fawned over.

The only way I can have the energy to promote other people, however, is if I put myself out there as much as they do. When it comes down to it, we all feel the same way when it comes to sharing our work. We all respect and appreciate other people with beautiful talents. And we all battle imposter syndrome every time we sit down to the page. All of us.

We’re all constantly re-learning that there is no spoon. There is no creative blessing that makes some people artists and other people not. There’s only art. Making stuff. Trying things out. Experimenting. Practice. And, above all, having fun and not worrying about the end result.

Letting go and riding on the wings of your creative voice. That’s where the joy is at anyway, isn’t it? For some that might be in mastering the details of a portrait, for others it might be expressing their emotions with flashes of paint across a wall. For me, making art means playing with whatever ideas come to mind in that moment without concern about the final product.

That makes it sound so easy. Oh boy. Let me tell you right now that it is not. Letting go of the dissonance between the images in my mind and the replication I make on paper can be a serious battle – which is weird because the words themselves imply something so simple.

“Letting go” alludes to a muscular decision, an action that can be done with the zap of a few neurons. Maybe it can for some, but for me it feels like just the opposite. It often takes all the energy I can muster.

I’m working on this by trying to get myself to the page / the canvas / the paper as often as i can but, as you can see, I often avoid the battle all together by just disappearing from my creative pursuits for long periods of time. I’d love to say it won’t happen again, that I’ll see you regularly from now on, but that would just let us both down.

For today, at least, I have great news: I finally sat down with this postcard concept and gave it a whirl. Here’s the final product for you to oooh and ahhh over.

For those of you who don’t live in Oman, this is a painting of possibly my favorite wadi around: Wadi Shab (here’s where you appreciate the pun in the title of this post…I’ll wait…)

Because of the previously mentioned internal battle I have when I’m making art, I also wanted to share the process with you – mainly to show you that I really did plan to give up a few times along the way.

I’m learning that, to get to the end product, you have to make your way there in stages. Don’t laugh. It really was news to me. I always thought artists pulled up a canvas and worked their way from top left to bottom right, every line a perfectly finished product until they reached the end. That’s very much not the case. Each work is a lasagna of refinement. You start with the basics, the general layout, the big essential elements and work your way to the details (there’s a life lesson in there I’m sure).

The funny thing was, nothing looked like the end product until I actually got to the end. It wasn’t until I scanned the last image in and saw it on my computer that I thought “Well damn! That looks like exactly what I had in my mind! Whaddya think of that?”

I didn’t see that coming.

All along the way I wanted to stop and give up, frustrated that it wasn’t what I thought it would be, what it could be. But, for a change of pace, I didn’t. This one time I kept telling myself it was just practice, my first attempt and nothing more, that it didn’t matter what it looked like at the end because I was learning along the way.

I don’t know how I managed to let go with this one, but I’m pretty freakin’ pleased with the result. I’m even more pleased that I forced myself to learn my lesson once again while still having fun along the way. And I’m pleased that I could think of such a fitting title for this post while also making it a cheesy pun.

I’m easily pleased.

Until next time.

If there is one thing I have consistently wanted to be good at, a talent I have desperately envied in others my entire life it is this: illustration.

From time immemorial, I have had an absolute obsession with all things paper and pen. The closet in my childhood bedroom was absolutely enormous (not just in kid relativity) and one entire shelf was full of paper – top to bottom, side to side. I had all the colors, all the thicknesses, all the textures you could possibly imagine. The shelf above that was rammed full of pens and pencils – jars of them, bags of them, drawers of them. I had skinny ones, fat ones, glittery ones, inky ones, scratchy ones, markers, sharpies, colored pencils, crayons – anything I could convince my mom to buy or get away with accidentally not returning to whoever lent it to me (yes, I am the place where all your missing pens end up. Mystery solved).

Pen and paper are the perfect marriage for me. They are all I really need in my life. They let me write, they let me read, they let me doodle, they let me fantasize and wander and daydream. There are few things I love more than black ink on a white page. I love coloring in the spaces. I love appreciating the lines. I love whimsical swirls. I love ominous images. I love it all. I cannot get enough of it.

In my adult life, I can and have quite easily gotten quite lost in the world of illustration online. I used to haunt a series of blogs, watching the artists talk together, listening to them inspire and support one another, and feeling utterly despondent that I couldn’t be a part of that world.

This envy comes from the fact that every time I put my own pen to the page, I produce the most infantile scrawlings known to man. My dogs look like small, deformed elephants. On a good day, my people are stick shaped. I am either the very best or absolute worst partner you could ever have at Pictionary – it all comes down to how much you like to laugh.

I have never let myself imagine that I could call myself an illustrator, that I could put myself in this class of people I respect and love so completely. That I could actually belong with people who are so creative, so incredibly inspired, so beautiful. Every time I have ever touched my pen to the page, I have heard the tape in my head start to loop “I can’t draw. I can’t draw. I can’t draw.” and I have stopped – broken, sad and completely defeated.

For the last few weeks, I have been going through the Artist’s Way book (a truly amazing read and creative adventure I think everyone in the world could benefit from), and it has stirred up a lot for me. It has made me address some of my ideas about what creativity means, about where it comes from and what it is capable of. It’s also made me see a lot more clearly what it looks like when a creative person stops themself from doing the thing they are compelled to do.

This realisation came to me as an image – as it always does – and I was desperate to express it as a drawing. All I wanted to do was draw a stick figure carrying a hobo bag on a stick. That’s it. But the thought terrified me. My hands were shaking and I was absolutely panic stricken that I wouldn’t be able to draw even that simple image.

And yet, I started.

I drew heads that were too wonky. Smiles that were too creepy. Legs that were anatomically impossible. It was kind of a mess – but I kept going.

It took me two pages of practice to get the beginnings of the image I wanted. But after some tweaking and some wishing, I sat back and saw exactly what I sat down to draw. I couldn’t have been more chuffed to see my pen create the perfect image for what I was feeling.

It made me go a little nuts. I was so excited about making an image I was proud of that I spent the next few days in a total Sharpie frenzy. I couldn’t draw enough. I couldn’t be with my notepad long enough. I would make myself stop for a while to start on other projects – things I have to do to live my life as a responsible, adult-type person – but I could only think about drawing. And for the first time in my life, I found a strange thing happening with my images. I started liking them. I started seeing them as a place full of possibility, a place for my own self-expression instead of a xerox machine for others’ ideas.

My images are far from perfect. They are far from skilled or professional. But making a lot of them over the last few days has changed my perception of what it means to illustrate. My whole life, I have looked at images that other people create and thought, “Oh my God! That is the most amazing/beautiful/stunning/evocative/powerful/moving image I have ever seen. I love it so deeply I cannot even express my total amazement at its beauty and my gratitude that this is now part of my life forever.”

Then I try to make that thing.

Unsurprisingly, it looks nothing like what I want it to. I can’t evoke the same feeling, I can’t create the same personality, I can’t draw the same thing. So I crumble. I grow despondent. I get sad and dejected at the idea that something I love so much, that fills my heart with such joy, that makes me so deeply happy, won’t come out of my own fingers. I curse my hands for their lack of skill and resign myself to appreciating the ability in others, always secretly yearning to make the thing myself.

But I’m learning something. It isn’t about making the thing that other people make. It isn’t even about making the thing that I picture in my mind beforehand. It’s about putting the pen on the paper and letting it do what it wants. Laughing at the turns it takes. Smiling at the colors it puts together. Allowing it to make what it wants out of the page. It’s about letting the image make itself, and not judging or censoring it along the way. It’s a really hard thing to do, which is why I am going to force myself to do a whole lot more of it – publicly, which is even harder.

I’ve been putting up images of my doodles on Instagram the last few days, if you want to check in and see what I’m up to. And for those of you who like postcards (who doesn’t!) for the next month (maybe longer), I will make all the postcards I send out (sign up to get one here!).

I am new to this. I am just getting started. I feel behind. I feel set back by my own mental blocks, my own definitions of what my expressions should look like, of what they should represent, of what they should embody. I am walking out into a completely blank space, and I am touching my pen to the page…

Noelle Poulson

Tag: artist’s way

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