Creative Flow PART 01

Trembling Aspen | Series_02 Hey, Koganecho! | Issue_08

It’s good to be in new soil. My first month here in Yokohama was good new soil. And that newness takes getting used to. Apart from the obvious cultural and linguistic newness, there was the newness of defaulting to solitude. Effort was required to not be in solitude, rather than the other way around. For an artist, that alone contains a universe of getting used to. For me it could be summarized as “I have the freedom to create! Why am I not creating every moment of every day!?” And then every permutation, iteration, modulation and mutation on that theme.

I walked into the newness, literally. I went for long walks, and I listened. I grew accustomed to the place, which simply takes time, there’s no way around it. As I grew accustomed to the place I also grew accustomed to the new world solitude had to offer, and what resistance felt like in that new world.

Artistically, my intention for that first month was to work on bokusho drawings. I had hoped for flow, it was a struggle. I made a trip to calligraphy nirvana, where I bought local materials, a brush and sumi ink. The paper selection was bewildering and overwhelming, so I bailed on trying to figure it out. In the end I got my paper at Yurindo, a book store/office supply store that felt less mystically esoteric and more plain old unfamiliar. Turns out, in the same way you can buy really good onigiri^[1] at any old convenience store here, you can buy really good paper at any old Yurindo store.

It felt good to start drawing, to put ink on paper, to be sitting down to something I was meant to do, to be giving it the time and attention it deserved. And at the same time, I was a new-to-this-material seed in new soil. I approached the drawings as an extension of the Evaporator Series, part meditation, part gestural abstraction, part action painting, in the spirit of hitsuzendo—a Zen Buddhist form of meditation through calligraphy. To sit with oneself, repeatedly, in a naked effort to make-sense of the world, is a struggle. No two ways about it. To make-sense of a whole new seed-of-self, in a whole new world of soil, well that, it turns out, is a challenge.

I kept making drawings I didn’t like. Over and over, and it didn’t seem to change. I only liked one or two out of every fifteen or so, and even then only marginally. At the same time, I know other people are sometimes drawn to works of mine that I don’t particularly like. I’m constantly surprised at what resonates with people. With that thought in mind, I kept going. I struggled with exploring freely on one hand, and being precious with the outcome on the other. I don’t use the word struggle lightly, it was a struggle. I was inclined to give it up and try something else. In the back of my mind was the thought that one of the crowdfunding perks was a bokusho drawing, and I needed to send something, so I kept going.

Here’s what I experienced in that struggle, and am sharing it here to remind us both that it’s true. When we abide with a struggle—any struggle, but in this instance the struggle inherent in creative practise—when we stay inside of the struggle even though there’s a creeping sense of uncertainty and fear, when we don’t flee, or quit and instead get curious about the uncertainty and fear, something opens up. I’m not saying something arrives, like a magical answer to an unsolvable problem. Our lives are not a problem to be solved, our lives are our own becoming. I’m saying exactly what I said, something opens up and the opening gives us access to what-is-possible. It doesn’t magically make what-is-possible reality, and here’s the answer, and now the problem is solved. The opening is just the first little sliver of light that seeps into a pitch black room when the door is cracked open. The opening feels magical, outside of us, like a gift, because we haven’t done anything to achieve it, other than abide in our own un-knowing, our own becoming. In the pitch blackness of un-knowing, we didn’t know where to find the door in order to open it. It just opened, on its own.

In the opening that I experienced, the Evaporator Series came to mind and I knew what to do with the bokusho drawings. The thing I now knew to do, I couldn’t have conceptualized my way to. While I say it came to mind, what I really mean is it came to my body-mind. For that to happen, I had to have actually done the Evaporator Series, in space and time, with my body-mind. That sounds patently obvious, and it is. What I’m trying to capture within the obviousness of the statement is that all the things I came to understand and know, all the sense-making that happened, even though I couldn’t necessarily articulate it—let alone name it—happened because I actually set aside time, to actually sit down and actually do this thing that was asking to be done, for no other reason than doing it. I didn’t know what it was for, or where it was going. I couldn’t have predicted the Evaporator Series leading to me knowing what to do with the bokusho drawings. That’s the beautiful permission that comes with artistic practice, to follow that little inclination as though it matters, as though it really matters, even though you can’t articulate, name or label why, because in the end, it really does matter.

I took all the drawings I had at that point, twenty one days worth, and photographed them all. I ran the photographs through an iterative series of computational processes, adapting the constraints and heuristics that emerged during the Evaporator Series.^[2]

I love it. It’s beautiful.

That’s a bit difficult for me to say, that it’s beautiful. My tendency is to qualify it, hedge my bets in case you don’t think so. Or diminish what I made with false humility, like I’m not allowed to say it’s beautiful, because I made it. Being in new soil allows for new ways of being, like saying things you aren't used to saying. Perhaps this currently conspicuous sense that, yes, I was part of making it, and it wasn’t just me, gives me permission to say it’s beautiful. Also, I just unambiguously know it’s true. Maybe it has to do with my own sense of integration, restoration and healing that came with looking at that image, seeing it for the first time. I included all the drawings, as they are. No edits, no leaving anything out. It’s all there, the stuff I don’t like, my thinking mind, my non-conscious being, my ego, the flow, the struggle, the honesty, the dark, the light. It’s all there. And when it’s gathered up, when the illusion of separation isn’t a barrier, when temporal distance is compressed in a way my conscious thinking mind can’t plan for, something else is at work, and it’s beautiful. I think it’s the most hopeful meaning-making I’ve ever participated in.

There’s more to say about this series and its place in the journey we’ve been on. I’m going to save that for the second part of this post, which will come in the next issue. For now, I’ve posted all 48 of the individual bokusho works I made over a 21 day period. All 48 works are present in the image above. I’ll tell you about how in the next issue.

By the way, me saying we’ve been on a journey together isn’t a glib nicety. I have a palpable sense of this community being present in the art work I’m making, as well as the residency as a whole. I look forward to telling you more about it, as I continue to participate in all the things made possible by our journey together.

And one more thing...

There’s more to come. I will be participating in the residency for another three months. I’m coming home to Vancouver, staying a week, and then returning to Yokohama until the end of August.

We have more work to do together, you and I dear reader. Plans are afoot. I think you’ll be excited to be part of them.

If you are one of the 14 people who will be receiving a bokusho art work as a result of your participation in the crowdfunding campaign, you will have received an email telling you how to select the work you would like. Selections are first come first serve, so if you’ve left the email to baste in your inbox, now is the time to take it out, it’s ready.

If you believe you are to receive a bokusho art work and you haven’t received an email
• Check your junk folder
• Send me an email at collaborate@stevefrost.ca and let’s sort it out.

My participation in the Koganecho Artist in Residence program, the art work I am making here, and this very newsletter were all made possible by members of The Mycelium Council. If you enjoy Trembling Aspen, a topical series of pop-up newsletters from me, Steve Frost, please consider joining.