The Creative Block
or, pat your bunny
Oh, did you think this creative block thing doesn’t happen to me? Because every week or so I have a new painting or some sort of creative endeavor to tell you about? Hah! Happens all the time. Sometimes only for a day or so, but sometimes for weeks or even months.
I’ve come to understand that the really long ones usually happen to me during the winter. I don’t know if it’s the holidays, then the after-holiday doldrums, or just my natural rhythm, but I’ve been through the cycle enough times now that I’ve learned not to sweat those. They are real and serious and not to be messed with. They are like high tide flooding a causeway: you just gotta do something else and wait ‘em out.
I know the creative juices will start flowing again in their own time and I keep busy some other way. Bake bread, read books, or learn something new. Last year I learned how to make 3D figures, like Dolly, up top, and this one below. Learning something from the beginning again was a challenge, but the practice kept my hands busy until I felt like painting again, and now I know a little about another thing. All good.
What I want to talk about today is a way to deal with those blocks that pop up randomly when I think everything is going along swimmingly.
I’m having one now. I’ve been happily (and a little smugly) painting along for many weeks now, very inspired by organic plant shapes and new color palettes. I was really on quite a roll. I think I finished one painting a week for five weeks.
Woo Hoo! Look at me go, being all prolific and shtuff.
And then one morning….. nothing.
And that was about a week ago.
Sometimes, just taking a break for a day helps. Nope.
Sometimes, free-play in the studio with different materials helps. Nope.
Sometimes crying in frustration helps. Nooope!
I muttered, “Get thee from me, Satan!” Nope.
I decided to tackle this one head on, to talk to it directly: I offered it butter-pecan ice cream if it would leave, but that didn’t work. The ice cream was good though.
Then I went at it face-to-face and called it by its name: Buzz Kill.
I described it in a journal using all my words: It was a ten foot tall, black ball of sticky, stinky tar, smelling like road resurfacing goo in the summer heat and the sweaty guys on the road crew who push it around with those whatever-you-call-ems on long poles. My feet were getting stuck in its drippy sludge. There was no banishing or getting around Buzz Kill. So I decided to make friends with him. He was definitely a him.
I welcomed him in: closed my eyes and literally invited him into my body. It felt like asking a vampire* to come into your home (they have to be invited, you know). He settled the cannonball that was himself right on my solar plexus and started oozing carbon ash clouds.
I asked him why he was so pissy and petulant and throwing his weight around. Why was he squashing the life out of my third chakra and messing with my personal power and creative spark?
He replied, “ Hey, I didn’t start out this way, you did this to me! I was a cute little bunny before you coated me with all this smelly goo!”
“What are you talking about?”, says I, “I had nothing to do with this!”
“Hah! I was a cute little brown bunny a month ago, just hanging around munching grass while you painted flowers! Sure I was a little skittish, but I didn’t know where we were going next and it made me kinda scared. I mean, what the hell were you doing painting flowers? You never paint flowers! Then you started covering me up with layers of this… stuff so you couldn’t hear me squealing and now you’re blaming ME?”
“Well, the last cute little brown bunny I saw got chased across the backyard by a mink and became hare tartare, so, no, I didn’t want to deal with any scared little rabbits just then. <sigh> But, ok, let’s clean you off and I’ll pat you a little and remember to tell you that everything’s going to be ok.”
And it will, you know. Whether we paint tomorrow or not. Because there’s no more giant black ball of stink hanging around, just a sometimes-frightened little brown bunny.
What do you do to banish your creative blocks? Leave me a comment so we can all learn!
*Plug here for one of the funniest TV shows ever: What We Do In The Shadows. You can find it on Hulu. I resisted it for over a year because I am not at all into vampires, but my son make me sit and watch one night and I was hooked. It is HYSterical.
Winter is when I feel most creative, all warm and cozy in my studio 😀 I find creative blocks come when I’m doing too many things and seem to lose my focus so I try to slow down and pick one thing to learn and that seems to help. Happy to hear that you worked thru yours and let it go!
I really like your imagery in this post. For those of us who create in different ways, this is a really great way to represent the block. Thanks for that! Also, love your little 3D figures!