Experimentation

Show Notes

Notes

• Dissect Podcast. The In Rainbows season is season 11, but if you’re a music fan it’s worth trawling through the historical stuff too. There’s some fascinating, in-depth analysis of some amansing albums.

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.

Today I’m going to be experimental. Most of the episodes I’ve done up until now have been to at least some degree scripted. The more recent ones are completely scripted. Although I found this a good way of making sure that I get the right thoughts out and say the right things and get my point across, I find it quite difficult to do. I find reading and speaking at the same time very difficult and uncomfortable and I find the process less relaxing and enjoyable.

Earlier today I was tidying up my studio. It’s a ritual I go through. You might have heard me mention it a couple of episodes ago. I do this when I’m feeling stuck or down and I need something to help me break the impasse and to feel a bit more positive. A tidy studio has such a rejuvenative effect on me. And while I was doing that I was listening to a podcast called Dissect which is a music podcast that takes one album per season and dissects it one track at a time. This time they were talking about an album that’s one of my all-time favorites which is In Rainbows by Radiohead. Now before you decide that you know you hate Radiohead and you don’t want to listen to an episode about Radiohead, I’m not going to do that. I won’t inflict that upon you but I might use it as a starting point or a jumping off point for what I have to talk about which is experimentation.

Because Radiohead’s career has been to one degree or another defined by experimentation from their initial forays as a pop indie band through releasing some of the most important and lauded rock albums of all time including OK Computer, Kid A and In Rainbows. And they have a fairly exhaustive and thorough approach to creativity and experimentation that is quite alienating to some people but I think comes through in their work. I think you would struggle to argue that they weren’t a very very creative band.

Anyway while I was sweeping up my studio I thought I need to experiment some more. I feel like I’m in a bit of a creative rut. I’ve got some things going on in the background that I’ve had going for a while and I think in their own right they’re very creative and experimental but it’s a bit of an ongoing process and so it’s become part of the furniture. It’s become less exciting even though I’m still very motivated to carry on with it. In general I’m feeling like I’m a bit of a crossroads in my life.

It’s worth explaining a bit why that is. So for my other day job, the one that’s actually supposed to make me money, I’m a data analyst, a data scientist, I’m a data and an analytics nerd. I use programming and technology to take data and extract value in the form of insights from it. I got made redundant from my last role doing this in October last year along with my colleague and that was fine at the time. We were quite happy with that because we got paid a bit of money to go away and we thought well this is an opportunity to start our own business. We’ll try and start a consultancy doing what we do until it became clear that we’d launched our little initiative in one of the most economically hostile environments we could imagine. So I’ve got a mortgage, I’ve got a family and fast running out of money and I’m genuinely in fear of losing my house and becoming unemployed for the long term.

On the other hand I’ve got my art and that doesn’t make me a lot of money. I’m not here recording a podcast about how to make your first million as an artist because I’m lucky to make a few hundred quid here and there. Art for me is and never has been about making money anyway but I could really do with it earning me a bit of cash right now and to be fair it has done. A recent commission did extend my stay of execution for a few months which is a real blessing and was a real joy to do. But now that’s finished and no further light on the horizon in terms of generating any more money or business. I find myself increasingly struggling with my mental health, feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness and generally mental fog that is preventing me from bringing a lot of the energy that I would usually bring to the things that I do.

Hence we come to a point where I find myself tidying my studio again and it really did need it so it’s not a wasted effort by any means but listening to this podcast about Radiohead and how they locked themselves away and imposed all sorts of fairly bizarre scenarios on themselves to force themselves out of the musical and creative ruts that they found themselves in. A band that pride themselves on always creating something different for better or for worse because it should be pointed out I’m not a fan at all of their last couple of albums and thinking to myself well you know experimentation is what drives my approach to art.

Part of the reason I’m struggling so much to sell my art is I think because it’s so inconsistent. Not in my belief in terms of quality but in terms of the theme and the style and the general narrative that flows through it. If you know me at all you’ll see that narrative but if you don’t know me then it’s going to look like someone who’s just scatter gun cherry picking doing bits here and bits there not really settling on a particular style. I experiment a lot and this is who I am. I think it comes very much from the ADHD side of my personality. I tend to jump from one thing to another because I get my energy from starting things, I get my energy from novelty and so I don’t restrain that because when I try and follow a particular thread stylistically or thematically I get bored and then when I get bored I get depressed and when I get depressed all sorts of bad things happen to me and those around me and it’s not a nice place to be.

So I find myself observing a lot of the artists that are out there that are commercially successful and if you look at those, not exclusively but the primary driver for most of them is consistency of style and theme and subject. They find something that works for them and hopefully that they enjoy and they make lots of that because that’s what sells and that’s how they make money. Now I faced the problem of doing that. I would destroy my mental health and the therapeutic value of the artistic creative process, for me at least, and that poses a dilemma because I know I can produce high quality consistent work. I just know that it will also destroy me and listening to this podcast about Radiohead who took this exact challenge on face value and came out of it like phoenixes from the ashes over and over again by pushing their creative boundaries.

Now I recognize they were in a fairly privileged position. Their first album despite being pretty crap sold a lot and they had the backing of a major label with lots of money who were willing to let them experiment and most of us aren’t in that position but it took an act of bravery to do what they did. Many people would consider their subsequent two albums as being they should by any standards be career suicide. Now I don’t really want to delve into why they won. It’s not really important I think to this conversation and you don’t have to like their work to recognize that they did take risks. Whether you think that they were good risks, whether you think they made good art, there is absolutely no doubt that they took huge risks when they did that and those risks paid off in spades and allowed them even more creative freedom.

It’s hard to see how you’d find yourself in that position as an artist and I at least to some degree am privileged in a sense that while not having a job I do have time to experiment but my whole focus really needs to be on making money and since I can’t sacrifice the creativity, the spontaneity and the experimentation in my art for fear of destroying my mental health further, I have to focus a lot of that on the other side of my life and try and be creative and experimental over there which of course suffers from exactly the same problem that if I’m not toeing the line and looking like the crowd then no one will want to hire us because people want what’s cool and trendy, people want to talk about generative AI, people want to talk about the the latest greatest new thing even though if you ask anyone who understands any of this stuff including myself and my business partner the reality of the situation is this stuff is overblown. There’s a lot of potential here and it is a game changer but it’s not as important as people think. It’s not as flexible, versatile, clever or intelligent as people think and the field here in terms of the intellectual side of it, it’s pretty narrow. A lot of the best, most creative people in the AI technology space aren’t particularly impressed by it. It’s basically just a big engineering problem which is fine in its own right but not what people are dressing it up to be.

So here I am talking about experimentation. I decided to do an unscripted episode and just let my mind wander on this a bit. Part of the process that Radiohead and many other bands like them and many other artists and creatives like them have gone through is simply letting it flow and I think it’s vitally important for the process of creation and even if you are someone who does stay consistent that has found their niche and their style and is happy within a certain realm, a medium, a subject, a style, a level of experimentation is still absolutely essential. Your work needs to evolve, it needs to be fresh, it needs to be fresh for you and it needs to be fresh for your buyers, your fans, your admirers and I think that experimentation is exceptionally valuable in terms of the therapeutic value of creating art because if what you’re trying to do, if what you point yourself at is a specific goal, a specific outcome, I want to make watercolours like this person. I want to make oil paintings like Van Gogh. I want to make music like Radiohead. I want to write books like Norman Mailer. You are setting a funnel for yourself that’s going inwards, that’s pointing towards a particular point and is going to lead you very quickly into the realms of disappointment, procrastination and perfectionism. This is not a good place to be if what you want to do is experience the therapeutic value of art.

Yes you do need to be a better writer, a better poet, a better painter. Yes you do need to get better at playing guitar or the piano or the violin. Yes you do need to practice and yes you do need to do the drudgery, the boring practice at times but most of the time that’s where as I explained in my earlier episodes is that’s the most important part. That moment where you’re laying down another scale over and over again where you’re practicing the same piece of music where you can just suddenly meander off and find some creativity in your motions and your movements and your muscle memory where you can lose yourself in the music, that that little trigger, that little extra thing that allowed you to meander off and do something different. These are the most important parts of the creative process. These are the most important parts to the therapeutic value of creation and artistry and excellence and so you shouldn’t embrace the practice but always look for those moments to jump off and run with them. Some of them will go nowhere, sometimes you’ll make a horrible mess on the canvas, sometimes you’ll just hit a bunch of bum notes, sometimes you’ll write 20 pages of utter utter nonsense that will be completely discarded, but sometimes you’ll make something incredible and you’ll find yourself in a flow state where you just keep on making wonderful things.

Interestingly it sort of doesn’t matter if what you’re making is wonderful as long as you’re enjoying it. As long as you allow yourself the brevity and the freedom to go and do something different, to experiment, to take yourself off into a different area than where you started off, as long as you’re enjoying that process and that’s what’s important. And so you need to look for the moments that take you away from your path and perhaps you know that your path is well defined. You won’t be able to achieve the levels of mastery that you want to unless you’re allowing yourself to be a bit more free and a bit more experimental. You need to be able to take yourself to places that you wouldn’t have otherwise and give yourself the freedom to do that.

In fact you should actively try and create those moments to jump off, to jump off the train, to take a different route. You should actively create things within your creative environment that forced you to or to give you the opportunity to experiment in different directions.

One of my favorite things to do is to take a blank canvas and then just abuse it, drip things on it, splatter things on it, smear it, create texture, knowing what I’m going to put on that canvas after. Not because I think that that’s going to improve my duplication of some image that I found that I wanted to depict, but precisely the opposite because it will make it hard, because it will mean that I have to think differently about how I create that image. It helps me to find new ways and new ideas of thinking about things and incorporate some of that chaos that I put on the canvas into that image and you’ll see that in many of my artworks. And that’s what a lot of these creative processes are about, these techniques you can use to break yourself from the monotony of practice, the monotony of the pursuit of mastery, is that you get stuck in these ruts and you need to create little jumping off points, you need to create disruptions to that flow that force you to think differently, that force you to act differently and it doesn’t matter if those things that you do don’t add up to anything.

You hear a lot, especially in sort of technology circles, about failing and failing fast and I think that this whole philosophy that comes from the agile methodology of software delivery has been massively overblown, but there is something to be learned from this. It’s not that you don’t finish anything, but it’s that if you’re going to do something you’re going to explore a direction and that direction is ultimately doomed to fail, then you want to fail fast, you want to fail and move on. But you also want to learn something from that process, from that digression. You want to learn that perhaps that route was a dead end, full stop, or perhaps there was something there but the way you pursued it wasn’t helpful, or perhaps it’s a medium or a subject matter that doesn’t motivate you or excites you. And those those pieces that you’ve got, you shouldn’t throw them away. You should actually go back and listen to them or look at them later and convince yourself as to whether they really were failures or what you can learn from them and whether you can build on top of what’s already there.

I always keep old canvases, I don’t throw away bits of paper that I’ve cut off things, I don’t throw away old drawings or sketches that I didn’t like or I didn’t think were good enough to share. I keep them all and I keep them all in piles around the place and every now and again when I need a bit of inspiration I go and sort through them and have a look at what’s there. Sometimes I’ll find something that was actually fully finished and quite brilliant and I will bring it back to life. I think actually I could probably sell that. Some of them are just scribbles and I’ll incorporate those into other works. I’ve got a lot of collage in my artworks and some of that collage is stuff that I’ve just to all intents and purposes discarded. And sometimes I just get ideas from that stuff and I can say well actually this was a bit of a weird experiment but I think I can take this somewhere.

And so experimentation then isn’t just about taking a different approach and then producing something magical because most of the time you won’t and maybe most of the time it won’t have a huge effect on your main body of work. But it will be there, it will have some effect and it will have given you that feeling of freedom and lightness and that feeling that you can be creative and it will give you stimulus to do other things.

For the therapeutic value of art to really work you need to be able to feel that you can be whoever you want to be uninterrupted and unencumbered and to lean into the person you are. There’s a lot of talk about being authentic which I think is in many cases nonsensical and focuses on being someone else’s version of authentic. If you want to be authentic self you just need to let yourself flow. You need to go wherever you want to go, how you want to go there, a time and in a place where you’re allowed to do that and no one can criticize you. And that’s when you’re going to truly relax into being yourself and until you are able to feel like you can be yourself and express yourself you’re not going to be able to to relax and relaxing leaning into the process is the important thing. And that can only happen on your terms using your methods. Yes you can use mindfulness and meditation, maybe you need to tune into the spirit realm, maybe you need to exercise, maybe you need to jump on one of these bandwagons, but ultimately you need to find your own path however that is and you do that by experimentation not by doggedly pushing against the same door. And you can only do that if you can do it by being free of the possibility of criticism and that’s why it’s important to take these moments to experiment when you have the freedom and the peace and the space to do so.

Anyway I think that’s all I’m going to say for the moment. I have a lot more to say on this subject and I have a lot more to say on many subjects like it. In the spirit of everything I’ve just said I don’t know how this particular experiment in free form monologuing went. I’m going to set it aside for a little bit and come back and listen to it. I’ve no doubt it will need a bit of editing or maybe I’ll decide to throw it away in the spirit of experimentation. Maybe I’ll share it, maybe I won’t, but if you’re listening to this I did share it which means I thought it was of some degree of quality, but maybe a disagree. Feel free to get in touch and let me know.

Hello it’s me again. So this was recorded originally just over two weeks ago. I’ve just finished editing it and have a few observations based on what’s happened in the intervening couple of weeks.

First just to cover off some of the themes that were covered in there with regards to experimentation, I’ll probably pick up the thread on experimentation in music particularly around Radiohead and their long time producer Nigel Godrich and the various techniques they use which I think have applicability across the arts, as well as the well-known work with Brian Eno and David Bowie using their cut up technique which I think is another thing that’s worth delving into. Experimentation’s a theme I’ll definitely come back to.

With regards to the general life situation which I talk about on this, things didn’t get better in the intervening two weeks. We took the decision last week that we were going to sell our house otherwise it might get repossessed. That means I have to move into another house and I don’t have my studio anymore, my lovely studio which I’ve made so much my own and has become my place of peace and serenity and happiness for the last couple of years. I have to surrender it. Hopefully its new owner will treat as nicely as I did. I doubt it will be an art studio again. You never know though. More likely someone will turn it into a garden office or a summer house or something. I just hope they leave it up and are nice to it for me.

Thankfully a friend of mine up here has a cottage that they can rent to me that has a workshop space out the back of it. A two-storey workshop space that I can convert into my studio so we’re going to rent the cottage off him. It’s only a short term thing, probably less than a year. That means I get to keep my creative space if a different one and I can make it my own for a very short period but I’m really lucky to be able to have any space at all. I’m unbelievably pleased about this.

With regards to my wider financial situation I’ve had to be pretty creative there as well. Among other things I’ve set up a Patreon account which allows people to pay me a little bit of money if they appreciate the work that I do. So that will be the official Patreon account for this podcast as well as my wider artistic endeavors. It’s still very early days and a bit of a work in progress but I’ll no doubt be recording some Patreon only stuff. I might do some studio work around art therapy, maybe some sessions that people can work along with and some tips and tricks and some more practical stuff that anyone who’s interested can participate in. So if you want to support me as a human, me as an artist or me as a podcaster please head on over to Patreon and there’s plans for as little as 80p $1 a month and the upper tiers of membership actually include me creating personalized pieces of art and physical art for the top tier. So if you’re interested in acquiring some of my work then that’s a good place to do it. There’ll also be members only discounts and artworks and so on that are exclusive to the members. Watch this space, I’m sure it’ll develop into lots of other interesting places and any help you can give me on that side would be massively appreciated. That’s all for now, I’ll see you next time.