artistic inspiration – Almost An Author

“You have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”
Miles Davis

A dear friend in France, a gastric surgeon, is the son and grandson and great-grandson of taxi drivers. Being French, the fact that his ancestors were both uneducated and dirt poor did not reduce their passion for art. They also desired to be collectors, even though they could not afford the art they liked. But as so often happens in that amazing country, they found a way around their limitations.

Although my friend has become fairly well-off, he has never been bitten by the acquisative bug. The irony of his complete and utter disinterest in buying anything is also very French.

In his case, the reason for not wanting to buy more art is because he already has too much. He claims the burden of inheritance has scalded him so bad he has lost his taste to acquire anything. If his wife wants new furniture, new kitchen utensils, new clothes for the kids, new anything, she just goes and buys it. Because she also handles their household accounts, I am not certain he even notices.

To enter their home is to pass through a rambling black and white museum. Because his ancestors could not afford paintings, they bought sketches. Many of the artists whose work they loved were starving. As a result, these artists were often willing to sell their sketchbooks for pennies.

Their home has so many framed sketches, you can hardly tell what color the walls are. Hundreds and hundreds of sketches.

Degas. Van Gogh. Pissaro. Picasso. Renoir. On and on the names parade with the sketches.

My favorite wall leads to the daughters’ bedroom, and shows four different artists designing a method to draw life-like angelic beings. Forty-seven sketches in all.

Every time I visit them, I am struck anew by the difference between what I see on their walls and what I find in the museums. Impressionist art remains a personal favorite. One aspect that I find so remarkable is the, for lack of a better word, naturalness. The flow is smooth, easy. The emotional empathy is magnetic. The world they create on the canvas is so reflective of the time, the place, and the artist. As I said, natural.

Only it is not natural at all. The evidence is there on my friends’ walls.

DO THIS NOW:

Stop viewing practice as unrewarded effort. If you’ve realized this already, give yourself a gold star.

See your finished work as a final goal, not something you launch straight into. Understand that elements like finesse and depth and layering all require very intense preliminary effort.

Step away from your current project. Determine a method of sketching. Use some medium that does not automatically translate into the project itself. For myself, this means writing out almost every scene of a new first draft by hand. Every scene. By hand.

Understand the intent of a different medium for your sketches: You are therefore required to redraft everything when you shift to your actual project.

Sketch out what you want to do tomorrow. If it requires several days to achieve this, put off tomorrow until the day after. This is important. No matter how strong the urge, don’t begin on the actual project’s next step until you have fully sketched.

When this next stage of the project is completed, take a good hard look at the difference your sketching has made to the finished result.

The most common fear about sketching is that it drains away the passion and emotional freedom you take into the project. It is important that you be honest about this. If you find yourself emotionally drained, if sketching feels like the voluntary application of creative shackles, then you must stop. But as I said, honesty here is vital. There is a huge difference between emotional constraints and the rigor of a disciplined approach.

Remember this word. It is crucial. Balance.

Davis Bunn’s novels have sold in excess of eight million copies in twenty-four languages. He has appeared on numerous national bestseller lists, and his titles have been Main or Featured Selections with every major US book club. In 2011 his novel Lion of Babylon was named Best Book of the Year by Library Journal. The sequel, entitled Rare Earth, won Davis his fourth Christy Award for Excellence in Fiction in 2013. In 2014 Davis was granted the Lifetime Achievement award by the Christy board of judges. His recent title Trial Run has been named Best Book of The Year by Suspense Magazine. Lately he has appeared on the cover of Southern Writers Magazine and Publishers Weekly, and in the past three years his titles have earned him Best Book and Top Pick awards from Library Journal, Romantic Times, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Kirkus. His most recent series, Miramar Bay, have been acquired for world-wide condensation-books by Readers Digest. Currently Davis serves as Writer-In-Residence at Regent’s Park College, Oxford University. Until Covid struck, he was speaking around the world on aspects of creative writing.

Watch an excerpt from his new book The Cottage on Lighthouse Lane here.

Learn about his new home at Blenheim Castle here.

Peak Experience

“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.”
Maya Angelou

The summer after finishing university, I left the United States. My plan was to spend a year in London studying for a masters in economics, then return home to North Carolina. Instead, I moved on to Switzerland, then Africa, then back to Switzerland, Italy, and finally at age twenty-eight I became a consultant in Germany. By that point, I knew I could make a living in business. Even so, I feared it was never going to give me the fulfillment or sense of belonging that I so craved.

Six months later, after a remarkable series of events (another story for another time), I started writing.

I wrote for nine years and completed seven books before my first was published. Pause here for a great deal of heartache, sweat, and struggle. NINE YEARS. SEVEN BOOKS. Working a full-time day job throughout.

Six years into this struggle, I wrote two Swiss friends saying that I was on the verge of giving up. These two guys, who did not know each other, both responded with the same message: I needed to come smell the ice.

I had of course heard the expression before. What they meant was, I should travel back to Switzerland and hike a glacier face. During my five years in Switzerland, I had skied over glaciers any number of times. But this being August, what they meant was something else entirely.

My Swiss friends insisted it was time, as they put it, for me to meet the ice on the ice’s terms. Alone. When the power was total, and the ice was my entire world. The rock and the ice and the power and the solitude.

So for my summer vacation I took the train down, and then another train, and finally arrived in Zermatt, the closest village to the Matterhorn. Early the next morning I took the Gorner Bahn to the top station, and arrived at the trail soon after the sun crested the surrounding peaks. Most glaciers are constantly on the move, which creates deep fissures and highly unstable surface ice. Chasms hidden beneath what appears to be a stable ice-face can be a quarter of a mile deep. But the Monte Rosa walk was unique. Zermatt is home to the only Swiss glacier stable enough that I could cross alone, without being roped up or in the company of a guide.

As I stepped onto the ice, a pair of Swiss army four-tracks slowly made their way along the perimeter trail. They halted where a narrow tongue of earth jutted like a peninsula into the ice. Soon as the engines died, three generations started piling out. Mom, Dad, more kids than I could count, another older couple, and piles and piles of gear. Only this was not mountaineering equipment. Instead, I watched them pull out frosted wine buckets, a case of champagne, picnic hampers, bottles of lemonade for the kids, a basket that wafted the scent of fresh-baked bread, a bag from the Caviar House, a wooden bucket of butter, and an entire wheel of cheese. Then the four adult men took hold of a padded stretcher and slowly, gently, drew out a very old lady.

As the men started across the ice, I saw that one was limping and clearly in pain. So I went over and asked if I could help. They explained that their grandmother was dying with cancer, and her last wish had been to ‘smell the ice’ once last time.

The old lady was there and not there. She smiled whenever someone spoke to her, and had a gentle hand for every child that came within reach. But her attention was really on the ice.

We hiked for about an hour, out to where the entire world was white. I left them when they stopped and began preparing their picnic feast. As I started away, the grandmother waved me over. She asked my name, then said in parting, ‘May you be blessed with a life of second chances.’

I left the family to their happy-sad outing and hiked across the glacier and up to the Monte Rosa hut. There is a healing quality to the ice in summer. The silence is much more intense this time of year. The mountains are very individual. Uncovered from their uniform winter blankets, they reveal very unique characters. The light is as glorious as the quiet.

This hike split me away from the hurried rush of business pressures and modern life. I was gifted a visceral bond to a very different world. Here on the ice, time measures seasons like we do seconds. The ice was here long before we arrived, and will remain long after we are gone. This walk offered me a partial, momentary, imperfect glimpse into what it means to live for eternity. At that crucial juncture in my life, this small fragment was enough.

When I returned at sunset, the family was gone. But the grandmother’s words held me still. As they do now, thirty-five years later.

American psychologist Abraham Maslow defined a ‘peak experience’ as a unique moment when time loosens its hold, the self evaporates, and the individual becomes captivated by a different and ecstatic view of their world.

In the coming posts, my aim is to examine the creative life from two perspectives. One will focus upon the commercial. How can the artist reach the point where they can live from their work. What does this mean in terms of commitment, focus, and aims.

Balanced with this will be my second direction; how to create an environment where such peak experiences are welcome. It is nigh on impossible to generate such moments at will. But they can be encouraged. The creative environment can actually foster their arrival. With time. And discipline.

Let us begin.

DO THIS NOW:

Close your eyes. Think back to an experience so beautifully intense that ‘time’ and ‘self’ were concepts that simply did not belong.
While in this moment, tell yourself that you invite such experiences again. You welcome them into your life. You are open to them, in whatever new form they care to take.