The Artist’s Way: Week Two Reflections

Recovering a Sense of Identity

Happy Sunday!

I’m currently completing The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron’s seminal 12-week creative recovery program, and documenting my experience and reflections in these posts. Each week of The Artist’s Way involves reading a chapter from the accompanying text, completing a handful of tasks, writing daily morning pages and going on an artist date.

Lessons from the Text

The second week of the program targets recovering a sense of identity. Admittedly, a lot of the text this week did not resonate with me. In it, Cameron talks about setting boundaries with people in our lives who may be hindering our creativity (including “poisonous playmates”, other unsupportive, blocked artists; and “crazymakers” who demand our time and attention).

The part of the chapter that interested me was a section titled “Skepticism” where Cameron invites us to open our minds to the possibility that “the universe” may be encouraging and cooperating with our creative desires. She illustrates this idea with the story of an artist named Mike:

“When Mike began his creative recovery, he let himself admit that he wanted to make films. Two weeks later, through a series of “coincidences,” he found himself in film school with his company paying for it. Did he relax and enjoy this? No. He told himself that film school was distracting him from his real job of finding another job. And so he gave up filmmaking to look for another job.

Two years later, remembering this incident, Mike can shake his head at himself. When the universe gave him what he wanted, he gave the gift right back. Eventually, he did let himself learn filmmaking, but he made it a lot harder on himself than the universe may have intended.”

When I was writing my morning pages this week, I reflected on my desire to be a novelist even though I struggle with my longform fiction projects. I find myself constantly bored, unhappy or overwhelmed when writing longform fiction, but have always found other types of art to come more easily- for example, drawing, writing nonfiction (such as essays and blog posts) and writing short stories. I asked myself why I have never taken short form writing more seriously, and why it was so important to me that I become a novelist instead of pursuing another path. I have always considered myself to be fairly agnostic when it comes to the question of whether there is a higher power in the universe (skeptical, but open-minded). But, this week, The Artist’s Way made me reflect on whether someone or something might be pushing me in a specific creative direction. I thought about what it might mean to try leaning into what feels easy and fun rather than pushing myself to do things that feel challenging and unrewarding.

Tasks

This week, I created a list of things I enjoyed doing and reflected on the last time I did them, drew a “life pie” illustrating my fulfillment with different aspects of my life, and came up with 5 more “imaginary lives” to build on the list started last week.

Most notably, however, was a task which asked me to list 10 changes I wanted to make for myself (“from the significant to the small”). Without thinking too much about it, I made a list- and almost everything on the list involved lifestyle maintenance work. “I would like to… vacuum my floors”. “I would like to… do an audit of my personal finances.” “I would like to… get better at bringing a lunch on days I go to the office for work.” I wondered whether I’d done the task wrong (and maybe I had), or, in the alternative, why lifestyle maintenance work was so important to me. In any event, making the list inspired me to do some lifestyle maintenance tasks, including cleaning my apartment. This ended up being good for me- I tend to be more creative in organized environments (when I’m not distracted by clutter and chaos around me).

Artist Date

For my artist date this week, I took a few hours and experimented with watercolour painting from the comfort of my apartment. I dimmed the lights, lit a candle, made myself a mug of tea, and turned on a watercolour 101 video I found on YouTube (The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Watercolour by Jenna Rainey).

The video covered a variety of topics from recommended art supplies to colour theory to actual watercolour techniques. I treated it like a real class: taking notes and practicing my technique alongside the video. Toward the end of the video, where the artist started to teach viewers how to paint a wreath, I opened up another one of her videos and followed a tutorial on how to paint a colour wheel instead.

I definitely did not create any artistic masterpieces this week, but I was happy that my artist’s date gave me the chance to experiment with a new medium that I am largely unfamiliar with. I have used watercolour in my paintings before, but without knowing anything about the medium- my technique was largely trial and error.

The theme of my artist’s date this week was “play”: I focused less on creating a perfect piece of art and more on learning and exploring. I look forward to continuing to paint with watercolour throughout this program and beyond.

Until next week-

Laura Kate