I interpreted a dream the other day for a woman and like usually happens, the more we talked about the dream symbols, and the more she shared about what was going on in her life, the more the meaning of the dream sprang forth. The dreamer, I’ll call her Ruth, is in her mid-forties. Always a creative soul, it has only been in the last three years that she discovered a passion for painting. She said she woke up one day and felt the overwhelming need to express herself through paint and canvas. For weeks, she painted with abandon, often to the exclusion of others, eating and sleeping. With no formal training, Ruth’s work is rich in color and vivid symbolic images. She, herself, can only guess at what her paintings are saying, but it is clear that much is going on. These are not bland landscapes.
Ruth exhibited her work. She sold four paintings, but is very shy about putting price tags on them.
Ruth told me that lately she’s run out of canvases and rather than buy more, she started to paint areas in her home—hidden areas. The insides of her cabinets, the kitchen table (that is usually covered with a cloth), the underside of chairs.
When she told me this, her dream sprang into relief. Ruth paints for the expression of soul, not for the consumption of the public. Her work clearly has commercial value, and if she desired to pursue a career as an artist, I’ve no doubt she would find success, but in her dream, her soul seems to be giving her permission to paint for herself first.
Fear of success is often a tremendous block to the creative process. In a writing group I belonged to years ago one of the women recognized that each of us in turn would preface the work we were about to read with a lot of protective incantations—“It’s not very good. I shouldn’t even read it.” Finally, to acknowledge our collective fear, we agreed to simply state, “It’s just a little piece of my soul I am offering for you to tear into pieces.” It takes courage and encouragement to share artwork.
Creating art is much like caring for a newborn. It is best to keep new babies from crowds until their little immune systems gain strength. It is best to let them have lots of dreamtime. It is imperative that they feel safe and loved. Those babies may grow to burst out into the world taking it by storm, or they may always remain a little shy and reclusive. Each has its own personality.
It is okay to create just for the sake of creating. In fact, for most artists, that is where the best work lies. Even for those artists who seem to have artwork pour from them fully formed as Athena sprang from Zeus’s head ready for battle, what remains hidden is the long incubation of creative ideas.
Chris Baty, the founder of Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month), invites closet creatives to take on the challenge of writing 50,000 words in 30 days. Mistakes, misspellings, and wrong turns in the plot are not to be deleted. They are to be added to the total word count. The Buddhist practice of creating sand paintings is all about embracing this notion of creating for the sake of creating. As soon as the painting is finished, it is wrecked. No attachment.
Ruth’s face lit up as I shared with her the story of an artist who forms elaborate fairy villages and then hides them in the most remote places in the world including underwater. I suspect that a part of her had been feeling pressured to try to do more with her paintings. With permission to paint for herself she looked to me as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
One day way in the future, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ruth’s grandchildren, called in to divvy up old family treasures, don’t discover these paintings, and even after being offered a fortune from great collectors, choose in the end to push the chair into the table, keeping the secret value all for their own. Some art just isn’t for public consumption.
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