I Can See Clearly Now
If you want to paint or draw realistically you have to learn how to see. I discussed this idea in my last post, centering on the idea that our subjective view of something (or the stories we attach to it) prevent us from rendering accurately.
Instead of seeing the shapes, colors, values, and outline that one would need to observe to able to replicate it, one resorts to stored perceptions about that particular object. It’s why (in my experience) people will draw something they’ve never seen before with more accuracy. When they try to render one my husband’s abstract sculptures, they have to look closely because they have no labels or old notions about it to cloud their view.
People come to art class having no idea that these judgments cloud their vision, and that they will have to practice for a long time to remove those barriers to their sight.
It’s exactly what we do with our life experiences. We encounter life, and instead of experiencing it, we’re conjuring stories about it based on our conditioning. We judge what’s in front of us. We really don’t experience situations at all. We regurgitate our ingrained perspectives, convinced that our point of view is reality, but it’s shrouded.
As in the visual arts, it takes a lot of practice to remove those blinders. Without practice removing our preconceptions, our take on life is colored, warped, and limited.
In psychology there’s a word I like: Confabulation. Our brain literally makes up stories, fantasies, lies, to explain reality. It’s automatic. When the mind can’t connect to what it’s experiencing with a deep level of awareness (because that takes practice) it starts drawing from its old stores of ideas, which were created from old experiences. And because of the way we’ve evolved, (being on the alert for danger) the situations that were the most stressful and scary are the ones that float to the top first. We are wired to recall those cautionary tales to help us survive, keep us safe.
Example. I’m taking a months-long marketing workshop. I was nervous going in because my perceptions about marketing were totally clouded by all of the negative programming that dominated my consciousness. I’d had years of blood, sweat, and tears with my marketing efforts in my career. I’d seen all kinds of schmarmy scamsters trying to con you in to buying their stuff online. In the background I heard my dad and grampa saying, Don’t be a show-off. These experiences informed and dominated my thoughts if you said the word “marketing.”
I’d overlook the fact that through my marketing I’d managed to make a living from my art most of my life, not an easy feat. I’d forget that my marketing efforts were kind of fun to do, almost always produced results, and had a created a business that helped a lot of people. Those were also experiences I’d had, but weren’t the ones that floated to the top when marketing was brought up.
So, I’m taking the workshop and it’s great. It’s a joyful, fascinating, mind-stretching, spiritual experience because I’m really looking and experiencing marketing with an open mind and a sense of surrender. And a willingness to practice something different.
What am I practicing differently so far? For one, I’m taking a workshop in an enlightened environment of people who want to do good in the world, and see marketing in a way I would like to. Their way feels better!
Instead of listening to the itty bitty shitty committee in my head, (which said that marketing is about begging and suckering people into buying your stuff, and that once you stuck your head out from under the covers, you’d be clobbered with humiliating criticism) I’ve learned that marketing is this:
I’m sharing my unique and lovely gifts, and that I’d be doing people a disservice my hiding them. What right do I have to deprive people of choosing for themselves whether or not they like my stuff?
For decades I’ve seen the astonishing transformative power of art. There is real need for what I offer.
I’ve been in business long enough to know that a tiny percentage of people will dislike what I do and be nasty and vocal about it. It’s so rare that it’s hard to believe I could fear it. The other 99% of people are either supportive, or polite, or at least quiet if they don’t like it.
This new take on marketing may not look radically different from the outside but it upends a lifetime of judgmental thinking that hindered major parts of my life. The new view just feels better, which changes everything. I can see it like an unfolding work of art where I call the shots from the drawing board to sending it off in the world. There’s no reason why it can’t be a light-filled experience.
I needed the perspective of others to push beyond the cloud of old conditioning and start opening my eyes to the reality of a win-win viewpoint. What do you need to open your eyes?
