#Resource --- tags: - Blogs - Project/Publishing - Art - Philosophy aliases: - artist's method image: "[[Trace Dance 1.jpeg]]" reviewed: 2026-04-28 --- # **An Artist's Method** *conditions → system → attention → orientation → chance → rhythm → naming → self → reflection → cycle.* Ten frames. Each describes one part of the practice. Together they cover what I do as a working method for motivation and discipline. --- # **1. Starting Conditions** I don't have a method, and I'm wary of the ones on offer. What I have is a set of conditions, a few habits, and a posture toward the work — and the conviction that practice precedes theory rather than the other way round. The doing becomes the path. Theory may describe the work later, but it shouldn't replace it. The conditions matter more than the technique. My strongest work tends to emerge during stretches of relative tranquillity — manageable workload, decent sleep, low external demand. Creative intensity needs nervous-system stability. Exhaustion produces repetition; rest gives the work room to differentiate. The other condition is freshness. Some of the strongest work of any career arrives early, before fluency — when you don't quite know what you're doing. The first blush of love only comes once with each subject, when you're still finding out the tip of the iceberg and full of wonder about how much there is. *Ignorance brings something knowledge can't.* T. S. Eliot from the other side: > The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, for the pattern is new in every moment. And every moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have been. Two complementary ideas explain why this matters. [[Iain McGilchrist]], in *The Master and His Emissary* (2009), argues that the right hemisphere — which holds context, gestalt, peripheral attention, and openness to the new — is the true master, while the left hemisphere, which handles narrow analytic focus and recognises pattern, has come to dominate modern culture and now mistakes itself for the boss. [[Anton Ehrenzweig]], in *The Hidden Order of Art* (1967), made a parallel claim about creative work specifically: it depends on the artist alternating between a focused *surface mind* and a diffuse *depth mind* that scans the whole work at once. The unburdened start of a piece belongs to the depth mind. The eye that hasn't yet decided what it's looking at is the eye that finds the work. When the work starts to feel "good" in the wrong way — competent, controlled, recognisable — that's the signal to let the surface mind off duty. Trust the process. Don't overthink. Get out of your own way. > The vase cannot serve its purpose until it is empty. The journal carries this principle into the daily practice — it is the place where the unknown is allowed to merge with the intended. More on that in §10. --- # **2. The Working System** It helps to think of the practice as a system rather than as a series of bursts of motivation. Systems theory looks at the whole rather than the parts, and the parts of an artistic practice are surprisingly stable. **Inputs** are what fuels the work — time, energy, materials, references, books, walks, looking at other people's art. If they're blocked, the system fails. **Processes** are the habits that turn inputs into work: a prepared studio space, a short ritual that signals the start of work, a low bar to entry — five minutes is enough. **Outputs** are everything the system produces, including finished work, sketches, failures, and the feelings that come with them. Frustration is data. **Feedback** is where the system gets interesting. There's a *balancing loop* that corrects deviation: if I miss two sessions in a row, I'm allowed to do five minutes the next day, no more, just to re-engage. There's a *reinforcing loop* that creates virtuous cycles: finishing a piece feeds back as confidence, which feeds back as readiness to start the next. **Environment** surrounds it all — physical (is the studio inviting?), social (do you have anyone to talk to about the work?), digital (are your tools set up to facilitate work or to distract from it?). Changing the structure of the system usually has more effect than changing the effort. --- # **3. Attention: The Eye and the Material** What survives every method, every rhythm, every generative tool is the artist's eye. Composition can be taught. Aesthetic conventions can be replicated. Technical skill can be cultivated through repetition, and increasingly through software. None of these constitutes art on its own; they are the alphabet, not the sentence. The eye is the irreducible thing — the way of seeing, the angle of attention, the recognition of what is worth looking at. It is constituted by everything you have read, walked through, lost, and noticed. In an age when the technical is increasingly automated, the eye is what remains distinctive. The artist is also the link between viewer and image. An image, on its own, is just an image; it is the artist's presence within it that lets a viewer enter. Without that link, the picture is wallpaper. Attention extends to the materials too. The surface of the paper, the viscosity of the paint, the resistance of the pencil, the temperature of the studio — each of these is telling you something about what wants to happen physically. Listen first, decide afterwards. The work has its own preferences; part of the artist's job is to find out what they are. --- # **4. Orientation: The Four Axes** The act of making sits somewhere on a four-point compass that works as a 2×2: the first pair concern *representational* work — pictures of things — while the second pair concern *abstract* work, where there's no depicted thing but there's still a question of what's leading. Most stuck moments are a quiet confusion between two of these modes. The compass isn't a prescription. It's a way of giving the surface mind something useful to do while the depth mind does its scanning. **Representational — where the image comes from:** **Subject → Object: imagination outward.** The inner image is the source. You draw what you can see in your mind, with no model in front of you. [[Francisco Goya|Goya]]'s *Caprichos*, [[Odilon Redon|Redon]]'s *noirs*, [[Hilma af Klint]]'s spiritual diagrams. ![[Redon's noirs.jpg|250]] **Object → Subject: observation inward.** The thing in front of you is the source. The bowl of fruit, the church, the body — you draw what you can see with your eyes. [[Lucian Freud]]'s portraits, [[Albrecht Dürer|Dürer]]'s hares and grasses, the Dutch still-life painters. ![[Portrait_of_Elizabeth_II_by_Lucian_Freud.jpg|250]] **Abstract — what's leading when there's no image to depict:** This is territory the mid-twentieth-century critics named. [[Harold Rosenberg]], in *The American Action Painters* (1952), called the canvas "an arena in which to act" — what arrived on the surface was the trace of bodily action, not depiction. [[Clement Greenberg]] distinguished this Action Painting from what he and others called Color Field, where the work didn't depict either, but issued from a sustained interior state rather than from gesture. Both modes are still recognisable today, in artists who have never read either critic. **Brush → Subject: the gesture leads (Action Painting).** The mark goes first; meaning is what survives the negotiation between the body and the medium. [[Jackson Pollock|Pollock]]'s drips, [[Kazuo Shiraga]] painting with his feet, [[Willem de Kooning|de Kooning]]'s slashes. ![[Jackson-Pollock-painting-studio-Long-Island-1950.jpg.webp|250]] **Subject → Brush: inner state shapes the gesture (Color Field).** [[Wassily Kandinsky]] called what's at work here *inner necessity* — an interior state demanding a particular form. There's no depicted subject, but there is interior weather that directs the mark. [[Mark Rothko]]'s colour fields, [[Agnes Martin]]'s grids, [[Joan Miró]]'s poetic forms. ![[Mark Rothko's colour fields.jpg.avif|250]] A piece can begin on one axis and end on another — a landscape may start as observation (Object → Subject) and dissolve into atmosphere (Subject → Brush). The compass isn't there to fix a piece in place; it's a way of asking, at the start, what the work most wants to be answerable to. --- # **5. Chance and Complexity** [[Brion Gysin]] worked by building elaborate structures out of simple gestures, prefiguring much of what would later be formalised in [[3-Resources/📚 Topics/Complexity Theory]]. The lesson isn't that the artist becomes a scientist, but that the same principles apply: patterns emerge from interaction, order arises from iteration, the work evolves through feedback. The artwork is not imposed — it is discovered through interaction. [[Odilon Redon]] showed how to make this practical. He worked in deliberate oscillation between control and chance, and he was clear about the hierarchy: > Chance is my servant, not my master. In a letter to Émile Bernard he described his method as half dream, half discipline: > My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined. Later, with colour and flowers, he spoke of *directing chance*. His wife Camille remembered him arranging cut flowers in a vase "without looking too closely," then painting their *apparition* rather than the actual bouquet. The looseness of the arrangement allowed accidental harmonies. His touch on the paper remained deliberate. > I place colour where chance has smiled. In practice this becomes a method: - Begin with unplanned marks. - Let associations surface. - When an image declares itself, pursue it rigorously. Serendipity generates material. Discipline gives it form. ![[TheProcess.webp]] --- # **6. The Inner Rhythm: Jo-ha-kyū** Most of how the work actually moves comes down to recognising what stage I'm in. Classical Japanese aesthetics calls the underlying pattern [[3-Resources/📚 Topics/Jo-ha-kyū]] — a three-movement rhythm used in theatre, poetry, and music. It applies just as cleanly to a single working session, a single project, and a multi-month season of practice. - **Jo** — the opening. Slow. The field is prepared. - **Ha** — the unfolding. Material develops, diverges, becomes complex. - **Kyū** — the resolution. The pace accelerates and the work reaches completion. Most modern productivity systems try to force clarity at the beginning. Jo-ha-kyū recognises that clarity usually appears late. **Jo — Gathering.** Fragments accumulate without pressure to resolve them: notes, photographs, atmospheric impressions, accidental marks, stray phrases. The task isn't to produce work but to prepare the soil. Live mostly in the wild meadow rather than the cultivated plot. Active receptivity. Seven days of capture without commitment. The metric is volume of fragments, not quality. **Ha — Exploration.** Fragments begin to interact. Connections appear, themes repeat, unexpected structures form. Sketches evolve into possibilities; experiments multiply. Chance and intuition are most active here. Protected studio sessions, but no commitment to a single direction yet — multiple parallel pieces in progress. **Kyū — Resolution.** The work that was forming quietly now demands completion. Decisions become rapid, forms crystallise, editing intensifies. What took weeks to gather can resolve in a few concentrated sittings. The rule of the phase is *finish*. Ship it. Don't second-guess. Don't return to gather again. The longer pendulum — between disciplined work and wild rest — governs the life of the artist. Jo-ha-kyū governs the life of the artwork. Most of the trouble I get into comes from confusing the two: trying to be in the disciplined plot when the work is still in Jo, or trying to gather more material when the work needs to be finished. The work must wander. But it must also arrive. --- # **7. The Generative Title** [[Toru Takemitsu]] held that as much as two thirds of a piece is finished by the time it has been named. The title is not a label; it is a generative act. A strong title creates weather before paint touches the canvas. It establishes: - **emotional temperature** — melancholic, expectant, electric, hushed - **temporal quality** — dawn, aftermath, suspended moment - **conceptual tension** — *Transmission, Fault Line, Holding Pattern* A title that suggests rather than explains narrows the field of possibilities productively. The painting begins to orbit the title; decisions about colour, contrast, composition become less arbitrary. *Cityscape at Dusk* closes interpretation; *Between Transmission and Silence* opens it. The painting's task is not to illustrate the title but to justify it. A practical method: 1. Maintain a running list of evocative phrases. 2. Choose intuitively — pick the one that produces a slight physical lift. 3. Write a short atmospheric note on what the title feels like, not what it depicts. 4. Paint toward the feeling, not the image. 5. Refine the title only if necessary. Resist explaining it away. Whole series can emerge from a cluster of titles. Naming becomes a compositional tool across works. --- # **8. The Divided Self** Discipline and authenticity often feel like opposites in the studio, and both feel right at different moments. [[George Lakoff]] gives a useful frame for what's actually going on. In *Philosophy in the Flesh* (1999, with Mark Johnson), they describe a deep conceptual split in how we experience ourselves: a *Subject* — the locus of consciousness, judgement, and will — and a *Self* — the body, the social being, the person with a history. The two are conceptually distinct entities even though they obviously belong to the same person; we constantly speak as if they were separate ("I had to force myself to keep going," "I lost myself in the work"). The "I" is the Subject; the rest is the Self. In artistic practice the same division shows up in two recognisable voices: - **The disciplined maker** — sets deadlines, refines technique, edits ruthlessly. The Subject demanding structure of the Self. - **The expressive self** — feels, intuits, wanders, generates raw material. The Self resisting the Subject's constraint. Lakoff's earlier book *Moral Politics* (1996) describes two contrasting moral models that map onto this dynamic. The **Strict Father** model values mastery, control, and endurance — applied to art it makes the work a triumph of will over chaos. The **Nurturant Parent** model values authenticity, vulnerability, and emotional truth — applied to art it makes the work an unfolding of inner life. The categories were originally about American politics, but the moral textures are recognisable inside an artist's head as well. Neither mode is sufficient alone. Excess discipline suffocates vitality; excess authenticity dissolves form. The frame shifts from *I must control myself* to *I collaborate with myself*. Discipline becomes a container for intuition; authenticity gains clarity through structure. The internal authority is no longer punitive but purposeful. Periods of intensity are not weakness. Periods of refinement are not betrayal of spontaneity. Doubt is not failure but dialogue between parts. --- # **9. Reflective Expansion** After each session: sit with the work, observe without judgement, notice the emotional residue, identify the elements that want to extend. Refinement emerges through attention. Iteration is not correction. It is continuation. [[Mary Oliver]] called the obstacle to this kind of attention "the intimate interrupter" — the internal voice that fragments concentration with trivial concerns. She named three selves that contend within an artist: the childhood self, the social self, and a third creative self that transcends ordinary time. The third self is where creative energy resides; the other two manage routine. This is also where to check the long pendulum. **Stuck in discipline.** The work feels stale. Self-imitation. Irritability. Ideas scarce. *Correction:* a forced day in the wild meadow. Buy something strange from a hardware store. Watch a silent film. Make nothing useful for forty-eight hours. **Stuck in wildness.** Many beginnings, no endings. A graveyard of half-formed ideas. Diffusion. *Correction:* a tight project sprint. A ridiculously small piece with a hard 48-hour deadline. Finish it. Ship it. Re-engage the discipline. The signs are usually obvious in retrospect. The point of the post-session sit is to make them obvious in real time. --- # **10. Iteration: The Cycle** What allows the practice to continue is not motivation but iteration. Each project moves through its own Jo, Ha, Kyū. Each finishes and feeds the next. The longer pendulum keeps swinging; the eye keeps refining; the depth mind keeps scanning. Between sessions, the practical mechanism is the journal — but a journal *per project*, not one master notebook. The compromise that works for me is a single book, physical or digital, that holds one piece of work from first phrase to last decision. The project journal holds the **intention** (what the work is reaching for, in language that pre-dates the painting), the **unknowns** (the chance marks, the strange fragments, the half-thoughts that show up while the work is in Jo or Ha), and the **record of revisions** (what was tried, what was kept, what was scrapped). This is where the unknown is allowed to merge with the intended. Cross-pollination between projects happens, but it happens naturally — a phrase from one journal turns up later in another, a colour relationship from one painting clarifies a different one. The discipline is not to chase the bleed actively; it dilutes the focus. One project at a time. The pollination is the residue, not the target. A few conventions help. Date every entry. Don't curate as you go. Review the journal at the start of every Kyū phase, not before — re-reading too early in Jo or Ha can prematurely impose a pattern on material that still needs to drift. > Imagination precedes execution. > Rest is part of the work. > Chance reveals; discipline refines; iteration deepens; naming activates. There is no rigid method. Only attention, oscillation, emergence, completion — and then the swing begins again. --- `Concepts:` [[Art]] · [[Philosophy]] `Adjacent practice:` [[The Shadowed Grove]] · [[Poetic Symbiosis]] · [[Production System]] `Companions:` [[Artist Statement]] · [[An artists eye 🧿]] · [[Journey of the Artist]] · [[3-Resources/📚 Topics/Jo-ha-kyū]] · [[3-Resources/📚 Topics/Complexity Theory]] · [[Odilon Redon]] · [[Brion Gysin]] · [[Toru Takemitsu]] · [[George Lakoff]] · [[Mary Oliver]] · [[Anton Ehrenzweig]] · [[Iain McGilchrist]] · [[Harold Rosenberg]] · [[Clement Greenberg]] · [[Wassily Kandinsky]] · [[Robert Henri]] · [[The Master and His Emissary]] · [[The Patterning Instinct]] · [[Against Method]]