Target Audience: Art Community, General Public
Author/Guest Blogger: Morgan Mathieu Tran
The problem, to begin with, is that I’ve historically conjured up very little fondness for “the process”. In fact, “the process” of just about anything, means an inevitable admission of my own imperfection, which, for this unequivocal Enneagram 4/INFJ, is a waking nightmare. Unfortunately for me, art is very much a process-centric practice, and rightly so. Though I would much prefer the swift arrival of a “perfect” final product over any actual process, the art of making demands our mindfulness. Birch Cove defines mindfulness as “the practice of being in the mind, the focus on oneself, and applying the lens of being in the present moment”. And that necessary mindfulness is, you guessed it, in the PROCESS.
When I was in college studying art, I had every intention of being a full-time producing artist come graduation. But there was one, ever-looming raincloud of a problem: I was frequently miserable in the studio. Long hours, mistakes (real and perceived), misstrokes of the paintbrush, ill-drawn proportions, the wrong color placed in precisely the wrong spot. They were all the end of the world, and I was regularly discouraged. So many of my art department peers were poetically enamored with “the process”. They would gush about the transformative, therapeutic, cathartic quality of their time spent in production. I couldn’t relate. “The process” and I were bickering roommates that could never seem to get along. And this went on for years. In fact, it went on until about last year, in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I was struggling, burnt out like everyone else, and dying to invest more time in my own creative practice, which frequently takes a back-burner to my role as an arts administrator (don’t get me wrong, it’s a rewarding and often charmed career that I am grateful for everyday, but I needed my own expressive outlet). As I poured out ideas and scribbled and planned new projects, I had a jarring realization. I don’t really like painting. For an arts academic, this was the equivalent of an existential crisis. It took a lot of introspection to finally make peace with the fact that I didn’t enjoy painting, and to realize that it was okay. With that small liberation came the ripple effect of freedom to test new creative waters.
Cue printmaking. It was a quick and easy fall into romance with a creative method I hadn’t really dabbled in since grade school. If you’re at all familiar with printmaking, specifically woodcut and linocut methods, you know it is an extremely error-prone approach to art-making. One slip of the hand, and hours of work can be ruined in an instant by your carving tool. Sounds like a perfectionist’s fever dream, right? I thought so too.
And yet, I somehow found myself in love with the process of it all (ME! In love with the process!?). It was reductive. To get the trace of an image I would eventually print in ink, I had to carve away lines, bit by bit, motion by motion. It was much like carving away insecurities and hesitations, a little at a time. There was something therapeutic about it. I had never experienced that sensation while making art before. I’d always longed for the end product, the perfect manifestation of my hard work, with the process far behind me. Suddenly, it was like “the process” and I weren’t bickering roommates anymore. Somehow, we’d become old friends. It doesn’t mean that printmaking is easy (far from it, in fact). It just means that I fell into unison with something that nourished my soul – something meant for me.
And that’s where mindfulness comes in again. What I’d discovered was that, whether I hated or loved the process, the point was always being mindful of how art-making made me feel, what it produced in me – my spirit, body, and mind. Sure, some might say that it was a cop-out to not “make peace” with painting, and learn to embrace that process. Perhaps the day will come when painting and I greet each other as old friends. It’s just not today (and maybe not even tomorrow, or the day after that). Regardless, art-making, in the purest sense, requires our mindfulness. It’s the discernment and capacity to examine our state-of-mind and emotions at any given moment, and understand their effect on our creative output. Art will inevitably yield that which we are feeling and experiencing in real time. And in that way, our greatest, most vulnerable, and arguably most authentic art is not possible without mindfulness.
After all, art imitates life, does it not?
Morgan Mathieu Tran is a North Carolina native, with an innate, abiding affection for faith, nature, and art, among other things (like carbs and a good Lord of the Rings marathon). These affections have whisked her down a multitude of paths over the years. Two such paths, traversed simultaneously, led to her roles as an independent artist and a Director for a fine art gallery in Charlotte, NC. Her days are spent surrounded by art - if not that of others, then her own. When she’s not in the gallery, she can be found curled up with a good book, tackling some new creative project, or traveling and exploring the natural world with her husband, Allen.
Intellectual Property of Proximity LLC 2022 & the Author
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