After more than sixteen years of various forms of art making, Rafia Mahli has crafted a few passionate ideas on the subject. Drawing on academic training at university, a traditional apprenticeship at a fine art foundry, as well as solo and shared practical experiences, Mahli argues that an essential thing for a mature artist is an intuitive feeling for what to reveal and what to keep sacred.
“You could say that I have no inspiration,
that I only need to paint.”
— Francis Bacon
Artists of all kinds work hard to nurture creative inspiration; there’s a popular misconception that artists spend the bulk of their time waiting for the epiphany that gets them madly putting pen to paper or paint to canvas. In truth, it’s a constant effort to keep ideas flowing—through consistent output—to stimulate one’s own specific way of looking to generate interesting forms of things. The key to this is to allow inspiration to emerge without self-censorship, without judging the ideas in their infancy. Because such judgment is the absolute death of creative flow.
Experiment is the means by which artmakers encourage the flow of new ideas. This is what’s commonly referred to as an artist’s process. But how much of this process need be shared with a viewer? Too often we see process work being exhibited in the context otherwise reserved for completed artwork. This is not only an unfortunate violation of the sanctity of an artist’s own creative space, but a sign of their inability to delineate between process and finished work, a distinction which most mature artists are able to make. It is the difference between showing work that needs to be shown and over-explaining what one is doing in one’s work to an audience who most likely will not understand and, truthfully, needn’t be told if the artist is doing his or her job properly.
"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.
Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
— Scott Adams
Sharing work that is pure process is to surrender the one portion of artmaking that is by nature solo, private, and meant to be inviolate. You could even call it the soul of the thing. Within this private space is where the artist is most vulnerable—in fact has to be vulnerable for it to work at all. To be a great artist or even simply an interesting one, satisfaction must come from that inviolate part, not from the finished work, because it is that creative activity which keeps an artist going or makes his or her days interminable.
What I think is actually at play in the practice of revealing process is the notion that the public must comprehensively understand the artist—understand all of his or her inner workings—to understand the work. But that’s the same as saying you have to understand calculus to use a computer; yes, there may be some small benefit derived from it, but the idea that such understanding changes interpretation or appreciation is arguable and frankly dubious.
What I think is actually at play in the practice of revealing process is the notion that the public must comprehensively understand the artist—understand all of his or her inner workings—to understand the work. But that’s the same as saying you have to understand calculus to use a computer; yes, there may be some small benefit derived from it, but the idea that such understanding changes interpretation or appreciation is arguable and frankly dubious.
“The secret to creativity is knowing
how to hide your sources.”
— Albert Einstein
Even when conveying an artistic process is possible, how often is it necessary? After all, we easily get what a kid turns out to be without any interest in how he or she suffered scraped knees in the fourth grade or got really sick and puked in the eleventh. People look at art just like they look at a stranger: they make a connection or don’t. A mature artist knows that this arbitrary outcome is nothing personal and is not something that an artist should attempt to control. As pure as an artist’s process may be, a viewer’s reaction or non-reaction is just as pure for the very same reasons.
People bring to art their own selves. Just as we meet people and see them through the lens of our own experiences and prejudices—conscious or subconscious—we encounter artwork with an inherent bias. But today this idea is being challenged. The penchant for revealing the artist’s process derives in part from the conviction that an individual’s reaction can be “wrong,” that the masses need to be educated about an artwork or about art in general if they are to authentically appreciate it.
This is more than a problematic notion: it is too often the masking of a lazy or uncommitted approach by the artist. If artwork doesn’t stand on its own and connect with people on a human level, who in the hell wants to read a long explanatory statement about it? Or view additional explanatory artworks? In the long run, neither an artist’s requirement to expose his or her work to a wider audience nor the public’s understanding and appreciation of art are served by this approach.
“When I’m painting, I’m not aware of
what I’m doing. It’s only after a get
acquainted period that I see what
I’ve been about.”
— Jackson Pollock
Art should walk on its own two legs and communicate intuitively, even if the viewer’s resonances are different from the artist’s own. And the success of that communication rests largely with the artist’s ability to hold back the parts of the process that belong solely to he or she—and to surrender only the things that properly yearn to be shared with the public.
Rafia Mahli makes art for love and designs things for a living in Ottawa.
