Show Notes
- 00:00 Introduction to Art Against Mental Illness
- 00:24 The Concept of Beginnings
- 02:02 Overcoming Barriers to Starting
- 05:24 The Importance of Just Getting Started
- 10:36 The Role of Flow States in Creativity
- 12:41 Misconceptions About the Creative Process
- 15:56 Homework and Final Thoughts
Transcript
Welcome to the Art Against Mental Illness podcast. My name is Alex Loveless and this is my podcast about the healing powers of art. For artists, art lovers, the art curious, and anyone with an interest in mental health and well being.
Welcome to my podcast. I’m recording from my garden studio, so you might hear some birds around me.
Hopefully this is the first of many episodes of my podcast. We’re going to talk about beginnings today. I love starting things, for example podcasts. I’m not so good at finishing, but I don’t really intend to finish this. Hopefully this is an ongoing thing.
So the best stories rarely start at the beginning. They tend to jump into the middle and work their way outwards from there. I don’t really see this as a linear narrative. I see this as a sort of more a set of interlinked themes and stories and subjects that you can come in at any point and find, something that you can relate to. I’m also not going to do a long introduction about why I believe artists therapy and why I’m doing this podcast at all. I think that will come out in the mix. We’ll talk in the future about my own struggles with mental illness, as well as my journey to discovering art as a therapeutic outlet. But this podcast isn’t therapy. Well, okay, it is a bit in part for me, but this needs to be useful to other people and not just me and it needs to be practical.
Others need to experience the therapeutic value of art. So we’ll hear some stories hopefully from me and from some other people, but we’ll also be talking about some stuff that you can do to help to maintain your own mental health and help those around you maintain theirs.
So I’m a creator, most prominently of artworks, paintings, drawings, that type of thing. And it also seems now podcasts and various other things too. But I think that all art is therapy, regardless of your relationship to it. And so I’ll be exploring all aspects of art, even the bits I’m not myself particularly familiar with. This episode is still about beginnings, uh, beginning your art journey or just beginning your next piece or even just getting back into it.
Perhaps oddly I’m going to start talking about not starting or specifically the barriers to starting. The opposite of starting things is procrastination and this is something you’ll hear spoken about a lot. In the art community, in the mental health community, the neurodiversity community, and there’s quite a few reasons why you might not be able to start something.
I just don’t have the time. I keep trying and then I get distracted. My life just keeps getting in the way.
Procrastination is also to some degree a trauma response. I think a lot of people have tried to start creative projects in the past and perhaps have been let down by those around them who haven’t been supportive or have been overly critical. Perhaps it was a teacher at school, perhaps it was a girlfriend or a friend or a sibling, particularly siblings can be quite brutal in your early expeditions as a creative or creator or an artist.
And so you don’t want to repeat that you don’t want to risk being made to feel small or minimised. And that bleeds into the sort of next which is that’s a form of, of low confidence. I can’t do this, I suck, I’ve never been good with art, I’m not very creative. I can’t write, I can’t sing, I can’t dance.
And and of course, at this point, maybe you can. Maybe you can, or maybe you can do some of it. And that again leads on to the next point, which is perfectionism. And, and this is a killer, I think that people mistake for sensible thinking, but really isn’t that, you know, I can’t start this, I can’t carry on with this piece of work, it’s not good enough. I need for this to be good enough so that people respect me so that I can be proud of this so that I can show it to people. And so maybe you’ve had a few false starts in the past and you’ve kind of put yourself out there you’ve put your art you put your creations out there and and you sort of really feel like you’re surrounded by people who really know what they’re doing that they’re really really on it and that you feel like a complete imposter and we get into imposter syndrome.
Another reason is creative block, perhaps analysis paralysis, we’ve heard it a lot called writer’s block. And that’s where you’re already out there creating, but you simply can’t seem to start again, you can’t seem to move on to the next chapter, the next painting, the next drawing, you can’t seem to move, you’re overthinking, or you can’t conjure up any new ideas or any enthusiasm. And so that’s one of the very big, big problems I think existing creatives have.
And then there’s just the general noise of modern life. Your phone is constantly chirping away at you, drawing your attention. You end up doom scrolling on Facebook, dopamine hunting on Instagram or TikTok, or getting sucked into YouTube videos and suddenly the two hours you had spare have disappeared.
And that was a time that you should have been perhaps being creative and you end up in a bit of a cycle there of self recrimination. Well, I didn’t do that. I didn’t do the thing that I should have been doing. I wasn’t creative. I’m a terrible person. Well, this is just me, I have to live with that.
And I think that all these things can come into play at some point in terms of stopping you from starting.
We’ll delve down on all of these, perhaps some of them in great detail in the future. And I could sit here for a really long time now going through each of those and explaining why these things happen in detail and how to overcome them and why they are often false methods of thinking and we’ll come to that in the future but I wanted this first episode to feel positive so I want to talk about how to just get started.
So I’m going to talk about how I get started and I’m also going to cover off a few of the misconceptions about getting started and getting on your way for your creative project or endeavor.
So I don’t, I didn’t plan a lot. I don’t think a lot about the artworks that I produce. My process is, is naturally spontaneous. I think this comes from the ADHD half of my brain. I get bored with projects really quickly. So if I, like some artists, create lots of sketches, lots of studies to build up to a final piece that then you finally can get stuck into and start working on. By the time I’ve got through my third sketch and study, I’m bored with the idea I’ve talked myself out of it, or I’ve just got distracted by a shiny new thing, a new idea.
I’ve had so many false starts by trying too hard to start, trying too hard to make something that I had in my head at that moment in time. And I actually find it best to just to act on my ideas as soon as they come into my head. The reason I can do this , and actually ever finish anything, is because I always have multiple things on the go at the same time.
I’ve set my studio, my life, my approach up, so I can react to ideas as they come to me and I can set priorities. And so I might have a commission on, of course that takes precedence, especially if I’ve got a time limit on it. I don’t really like it as it is, but there’s probably something here, or even if there isn’t, I’ll just stop and I will put that aside and I will go back to one of the other pieces I was working on or I will start a new piece. And I always used to think that this was a terrible thing, so I’ll never go back to these. But actually what I found is that if I give myself a little break, a holiday, and that can be anything from a day to, to a year or two to several years.
In some cases, I’ve got pieces of artwork that I’ve been working on, on and off for literally four years. And I’m fine with that because I’ve always got new things churning through. So I do revisit them. And I’ll, I’ll either finish the idea that I was on or I will take it in a new direction.
And that’s a new start. It’s a new beginning. Well, here’s a piece. I look at it now and I think about it totally differently. And so I start taking that in a new direction, which for me is a new piece of art, it’s a new idea.
And because I’ve relaxed my rules on on things like perfectionism, because I don’t worry too much about things having to be finished or looking perfect, I don’t mind starting new things and going on to other things, because it’s all part of the process and that’s really important to me, because it means I don’t find it hard to start.
Now it’s worth bearing in mind that I am I’m in a bit of a fugue state at the moment, I’ve just finished a really big, commission that was really amazing and creative and some of the best work I’ve ever done. And I’ve sort of stopped and so much of my creative energy and my time went into that.
But I didn’t stop, I immediately started making new canvases, I immediately started playing around and just making a mess. And and I took some old ideas that I had. And I just started playing around with them and shoving them on canvases, and they’re not very good.
And I’m looking at one now thinking, Okay, it’s fine. And, and maybe I’ll pick it up later today. Or maybe I’m just gonna stick it aside. But that’s just fine. And I almost look forward to that moment when I get back to it.
Then that’s how you get started. And I think Just breaking that barrier and just doing something, anything, just take a piece of paper out and start scribbling on it. Start up your PC, record yourself talking about something, start tapping some words into a, into a document, just do anything to just do something. Don’t be judgmental about it. Don’t look at a sketch you just did. did and think, well, that took me about 10 minutes and it’s rubbish and it wasn’t worth doing.
Just move on to the next one. If you look back at it and you think, well, this isn’t okay. I don’t think this is very good, then fine, right? Put it aside, start something new. And that’s what’s really important to be doing things and to be not to be critical about the things that you’re doing while you’re doing them.
You’re constantly making choices little criticisms as you go along when you’re making a work of art. And that’s how the creative process works. That’s what how when you start at one point, and you finish at another, you end up with something that when it started was just nothing was a blank canvas.
And at the end is something beautiful, because you took lots of little creative and critical decisions as you go along, and criticism part of the process, and you have to just let it flow. That’s why beginnings are so important. That’s why starting something is important because you’re looking for that flow and we’ll go into flow states later on, probably in quite some depth, but if you can trigger one of these flow states, when you get into that mode of concentration, where the world falls away and you’re sucked into that activity, that’s going to have such a profound effect in terms of keeping you moving and taking you on to the next idea and moving you through that creative process.
One of the most important and immediate effects you get from art is those flow states that break the cycles of ruminant, destructive thinking that personify so many people’s poor mental health or mental illness. And anxiety is a response to something that’s happened, perhaps in the outside world, but how you’re reacting to it in your own head.
And this is where you get things like cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, which looks to break those cycles of destructive thoughts and some people find that type of therapy really, really valuable. And it was less so for me, it pales into comparison to me being able to get into these artistic flow states.
Now, my mental health is very variable and has been for my whole life. And I think that being creative and having art as a creative outlet hasn’t cured my problems of anxiety, I will never cure those. So I need to manage my mental health you Permanently and so I’ve built the opportunities to create these flow states to create these creative interludes Into my life into my calendar into my schedule into my daily routine And so I have at least an hour every day in my studio free from other people free from constraints responsibilities chores anything like that I come into my studio and I do whatever I want I can let the world fall away and just relax and get rid of some of those anxious ruminant thoughts, those persistent ideas or, or that urge to be doing something or being productive in some other way.
And I can relax and I really, really do relax. And I want to just zone in on one particular sort of misconception , because I do talk about being in my studio and being myopically focused on the creative process. But that suggests that I’m bringing my whole self to that creative process at that moment, that I’m focused on the process, I’m focused on the creative act.
And I think this is one of the biggest and most pernicious and dangerous misconceptions that stops people from starting on any creative journey is this idea that you have to bring your whole self, that you have to bring your whole self and then that has to spew out onto the page or the canvas, and that it has to mean something.
I think this is such a dangerous way of thinking. And it’s probably one of the biggest contributors to procrastination. You don’t have to bring your whole self. This is not what this is about. Yourself is going to leak out everywhere in everything you do, whether you want to or not you don’t have to think about that process. It happens naturally, the moment you start creating. And so you don’t have to just say, well, I have to be here focused and doing just this one thing. I write blog posts while watching the television. I draw and paint while listening to. podcasts, I conceive of ideas while out walking, I constantly am churning things in my head, I’m never doing one thing at a time.
And I never bring my whole self to any given task. I simply can’t sit and watch the TV, I’m not capable, but I still love the things that I can watch on the TV, I but I’m never doing just that.
I’m always doing something creative on the side. And I try and do things that don’t distract me from what I’m trying to watch on the TV. But most people these days anyway, are sitting there with their phone in one hand, trying to doom scrolling through their social media feed and only half paying attention to what’s on the TV to the point where TV makers now acknowledge this and that scripts and formats and TV formats are created so that you can experience them without paying whole attention .
For someone like me, that’s a godsend. And it means I can do something like drawing which doesn’t doesn’t take me out of what’s happening on, the TV, but allows me to do something with my hands, allows me to relax more into something and to practice my creative skills and to, to make something beautiful.
I don’t do much with those drawings and the drawings aren’t the point there. It’s a relaxation. It’s, it’s the process I’m going through and it’s the ability to engage my brain in something that takes me away , from the world around me.
I’m going to come back to this theme a hell of a lot, that I thoroughly believe in art as a medium of connection and communication, but that’s only part of what’s going on. And that you need to. Remember that the process itself is just as important as all the individual pieces, selling or showing or getting feedback.
The whole process is the therapy. And I’m going to go into this in a lot more detail in the next episode, where we talk about process in a bit more detail and why it’s so important and valuable. So I’m going to start rabbiting on now.
I’m going to start setting a bit of homework and we’ll keep this quite easy to begin with. I want you to just go off and do something,. I want you to pick up a pad and any writing or drawing implement and just start scribbling. I want you to open up a notepad or word or something on your computer and just start writing it doesn’t matter what whatever’s in your brain at that moment in time i want you to go and dust off that old guitar you’ve got in the corner of your spare room and just start strumming away don’t even bother tuning it just make some noise same if you’ve got a piano or the old casio keyboard in your cupboard dust it off go and make a bit of noise you Do whatever it is, just do something and do it for 10 minutes.
All I’m asking is for 10 minutes of whatever it is that you think might help you stimulate some creative juices and then see how that makes you feel and reflect on not the finished piece, just look back and focus on the experience.
So that’s all for now. And I’ll see you next time.
If you want to find out more about me, I can be found on Facebook at Alex Loveless artist at Instagram at Alex M Loveless. And my website is alexloveless. co. uk