Is this the secret of art-making?

I shared a video this week with my Momentum students. It featured the British artist Maggi Hambling in her studio (I've shared it below if you are interested).

I chose it because of her honesty. She is totally without artifice, totally without pretence. She talks about her art life as being a constant struggle to get out of her own way, so that something else can come through her. And she says, quite openly, that most days she is unsuccessful. 

Maggi dresses for filming in her painting clothes. She wears no adornments. She appears to have done nothing with her hair.  She chain smokes throughout. She is totally without artifice, totally unwilling to compromise.

At no point in the interview is she trying to impress anyone. You get the sense that she see herself as nothing particularly special. She is simply an artist, who works hard at expressing herself, and who sometimes, if she's lucky, succeeds. 

As I watched Maggi, it struck me that maybe this is the secret of her success. This lack of artifice allows her to express openly and without fear. She is not bogged down in wondering what other people will think. She is unconcerned with making a good impression. Therefore, she has no fear of judgement and can allow creative expression to simply flow through her.

This is not something that came naturally to me. I was raised a people pleaser. The phrase 'what will people think?' was embedded in my brain from a very young age. Growing up, it seemed to me that what people thought was the ultimate measure of success or failure. You had to have good manners and stand up straight and alway look presentable because of What People Would Think. And as a naturally rambunctious child, this did not come easily to me.

And so, as I grew up, I was always aware of/worried about how others were perceiving me. As if I could control their thoughts if I tried hard enough. If I ever found out someone didn't like me, I would work extra hard to change their mind.

But when it came to making art, I realised something had to change. I somehow knew intuitively that I couldn't create if I also cared about what people thought. So I read self-help books, and watched gurus like Byron Katie and Peter Crone and Kyle Cease, and I worked on my thoughts, and most of all I made myself stay fearless in my creativity. If I caught myself slipping back into people-pleasing, I dragged myself out of it by making something deliberately ugly.

I am not yet 100% cured, but I am really far along the road to genuinely not caring what people think. I confess that I still colour my grey hairs and worry about my tummy, but I never create to please other people, or to garner praise. 

Later in the week, I shared a video with my students. I filmed it during one of my studio sessions, I was experimenting with ink and pastel and I had a wonderful time making some things that I liked and some that I really did not. After watching the videos, one of my students commented "it's as though you're never thinking of what other people will think. You're just creating!"

BINGO!

But now I am wondering ... is Maggi showing us the secret of being a genuine artist? Is it simply to strip away all artifice and then allow whatever what comes through?

I really think that might be it!