I like surprises. I like when something happens that is entirely counter to my expectation. It’s this I find comforting rather than the opposite because it reminds me I am not in control. The conscious mind is not God. And when I remember that the conscious mind is not God, I feel closer to my inner being. Gods and demons speak inside of us, directing us from the inside out. If we want to create our world, we must heed intuition first, that which precedes rational thought and connects us to the collective.
Sometimes I feel myself drawn from my center toward an action without any rational thought involved. I like this feeling. It does not scare me because I trust my inner being. I am not afraid to acknowledge its darkness, simplicity, childish affinities, chaos, jubilance or strangeness. I respect it. Where would art be without this trust? Soulless, derivative, well-meaning. It is the constant struggle of the artist to trust his or her inner being despite the opinions of the outside world and their effect on his or her ego. This is not to say the artist shouldn’t care what the public thinks about his or her execution. I believe it is very important that the artist execute his or her art in a way that the public, barring close-mindedness, can receive. But the artist cannot care what the public thinks of the message of the art. Caring about what anyone thinks of the message kills art.
Many artists decline to articulate the message of the art. This does not – even if the artist thinks it so – mean the art doesn’t have a message. It only means that the artist has chosen not to get rational thought involved in the flow of energy from unconscious being to material form.
What is most important then for an artist is not to understand his or her unconscious being but to trust it wholly. Second in importance is to learn one’s craft, to know and understand the concretes with which he or she chooses to express himself. The power of art stretches between these two poles – inner being and craft. If an artist is very purely expressing inner being, craft can be weak, yet the art still powerful. There’s even a contemporary fetish for craftless art. Perhaps it’s because the high polish of commercialism has over-saturated culture with the opposite scenario – excellent craft without expression of inner being. Artists like Daniel Johnston speak to the part of us that longs for art that expresses, with no inhibition, the extremes of that aching and exuberant inner being.
