Process/Practice

“If only Heaven will give me just another ten years... Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter."

--Hokusai 

Artists, like other professional doctors, lawyers, carpenters, or fishermen, practice a profession. Some argue that the term “practice” is simply a way to justify art school education, or school debt, or a lack of “career” prospects, or that the term “practice” is defensive, protecting artists from critical judgments—the artists can always claim they are “just practicing.”  

This misguided view about artistic practice is ironic since critical statements about artistic practice come from “professional” collectors, critics, curators, editors, educators, dealers, and others who “practice” their profession by making judgments about artist’s works. Without the artist’s “practice,” these professionals would not have a “practice.”

Artists are practicing a process. They never stop practicing. The destination of the artist is the practice, not the outcome or the results. Having a practice makes it possible to keep starting over. The works that results from the practice are like crucibles wherein the spiritual, altered states of consciousness, the “flow states,” are united with the materiality and the physical limitations of the medium and the world of matter. 

As James Hollis writes, “Many artists have testified that they might start out with an idea for a work, but then something else takes over. Their best work, they claim, comes when they are able to surrender their ego and their talent to express those images in paint, sound or words.”

But in each new undertaking, it’s possible to feel as if one has never painted before—that we don’t have a clue about what we’re doing. In effect we are starting over, because among other things, the practice helps one to attain the quality of “Beginner’s Mind.”

Hokusai said on his death bed in April of 1849, “If only Heaven will give me just another ten years... Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter." 

NOTES:

Inspired by conversations with colleague and friend, the late Charles Moone.

See James Hollis, Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men (Toronto, Canada, Inner City Books, Reprinted 2022) p114. © James Hollis, 1994