Dancing with the Gods: Reflections on Life and Art

by Kent Nerburn

Few people on the outside will understand the precarious nature of this life. They will see only the accolades and accomplishments, the apparent freedom and the finished products of your efforts.

What you cannot do is let yourself fall under the sway of the romantic notion that you should work only when filled with inspiration. Inspiration is a cruel mistress and a wily deceiver, and waiting for it will turn you into a lazy artist. Sometimes you must rely only on your own will to drive you forward.

For him, grand meaning or significant metaphor was not a necessary purpose of his art. His was the art of close inspection, the art of simple observation. It was not the art of great ideas. He was a translator. He took the world as he saw it and gave it back to us. And that, for him, was enough.

It is important to remind ourselves that what is central in any art form is not the scale or intent of our vision but the authenticity of that vision.

If you can find what it is that you can say through your art that no one else can say in quite the same way, you are getting close to finding your authentic artistic voice.

One of the hard truths of a life in the arts is that each of us, in some secret corner of our heart, harbours the silent belief that we contain greatness within us. At the same time we live with the private fear that when all is stripped away we are mediocrities with little to say and no ability to say it.

Early on you should make your peace with the inevitability of this struggle. Accept the fact that in the world of artistic commerce we artists are like farmers. We are the producers, and if our crops are faulty or the market has no interest in them, we shrivel and perish.

middleman, a broker, a dealer in art. What you must keep uppermost in mind is that money can’t make you happy but poverty can make you miserable. Poverty is a form of hunger, and hunger consumes the spirit.

Remember this: the greater your success, the greater the forces that will try to confine you. Though people will become hungrier for your work, they will become very much more specific in what they expect that work to be.

‘There is always some accident in the best things, whether thoughts or expressions or deeds. The memorable thought, the happy expression, the admirable deed are only partly ours.’ Henry David Thoreau

Einstein put it well when he said, ‘No worthy problem is ever solved within the plane of its original conception.’

As a creator, you need to respect, even savour, the magic of accident and care less about what is being lost than what is being born.

This may be the single most important truth that every mature artist knows: that, at its heart, our art is about what we don’t put in – what we considered and rejected; the choices withheld in order to illuminate the choices made. The actor knows the pauses that create tension; the musician knows the rests that build poignancy and offer relief; the novelist knows the spaces in conversations; the painter knows the detail that isn’t described.

The goal of any art is to pare down to the essence. The French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said that true art is achieved not when there is nothing more to be added but when nothing more can be taken away.

Knowing the difference between what is just resisting your initial efforts and what is essentially a false direction is a skill all artists must acquire. There are false starts aplenty, even in good work. But some efforts are doomed to forever remain in pieces, lacking that aesthetic thread that pulls them into a unified form.

This is what a work of art can do. It can make you feel like it sees you, like it understands you, like it speaks directly to you and your experience. It pierces the fragile shell of the self, and you feel that on some fundamental level not only do you know that work but that work knows you; it comes from a place where your spirit is congruent with the spirit of its creator. We artists all need to know such works in our lives. They clarify our sense of purpose and remind us of why we create. We can go to them, as to a well, and never drink them dry: we resonate with the spirit that created them, and that spirit is present every time we encounter that work. You need to find these works in your own life – to embrace them and cherish them. Yours will be different from mine – different art forms, different genres, different styles and sensibilities. They are your personal pole stars – the works that can guide you through the uncharted reaches of the creative imagination and orient you on your artistic journey. And they are doubly precious if they are from an art form other than your own because they guide you without tempting you to become a copyist; they carry you to the spaces between art forms where metaphor and imagination take wing.