“…more like remembering than inventing.”
September 21, 2008
post by Jack Hadley
I’M AN ADVERTISING COPYWRITER and graphic designer, but I have a few choice friends who are real artists. I admire them. I’m fascinated by the way they think. I enjoy being around them.
Several times, as I’ve read the first few chapters of Alex Bigney’s work, Talking to Tesla, An Artist’s Dream Journal, I’ve said to myself, “He’s talking about me—he’s talking about writing, not painting!”
Alex explains that for him, paintings can start anywhere—while driving or reading a book, for example. But they don’t begin as images, or even ideas. They begin as “shadows” or as incomplete thoughts searching for their place. He’ll often jot them down on paper scraps, then misplace them somewhere—or not.
Sometimes when I write I have these same kinds of moments where incomplete thoughts quite powerfully envelop me, then are quickly lost. These notions feel like parts of a puzzle that I haven’t the ability to complete—yet I sense that somewhere in my experience the puzzle was once complete.
Whether you consider yourself “artistic” or not, have you ever had this kind of experience? If so, share it with all of us who follow this blog by commenting below. Don’t worry about how well you write. Just capture your thought and express it. This blog (and this book, really) is a participatory experience, and slowing down to recall your own “artist within” can be very satisfying.
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I’m so excited for this book. Alex has read me some of it and it is awesome! He is very gifted as a writer and a painter. Check it out. You’ll be glad you did.
The creative moments you mention come to me when I fly down the road on my motorcycle as the wind whips stray strands of hair across my face and blend with the bending grasses along the side of the road. Suddenly I am once again playing hide and seek in the field by the light of fireflies and building houses that no heavily burdened adult could hoist his weight to.
Then, I have to smile because even as I write in this accusatory manner concerning how cumbersome adulthood is, I realize that I am an adult who has just shed years of my inactive imagination and risen up to leafy heights once more.
Alex’s book gives me hope. It helps me realize that my dreamlike travels back to the simpler world of childish discovery and innocence are not mere imaginings. They are the fodder of my present reality that urges me to continue to create.