5. Walk the Path
3 Pillars for the Creative Life
Big 3 Ideas from this episode:
The Metaphor of the Path is a way for your brain to organize TIME.
3 Pillars for the Creative Life:
1. Create an Atmosphere (episode 3);
2. Make Decisions (episode 4); and
3. Walk the Path (this one)
Walk the Path: You can create your own metaphor for your goals and progress - let’s create one for you!
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Have you ever noticed that everyone every teacher who wants to teach a concept uses the idea of steps, a stairway, a path forward. It want to explore this idea today to understand why we are so intrigued and motivated by steps, and look at it through the eyes of a few artists that use this concept in their art, too.
For one thing, if you are like most humans you take steps every day with your body with your legs with your feet. This is a matter of scale. This is how our bodies move. And often we don’t have to think about it. For most humans we wake up sit up in her beds put her feet on the floor stand up and start walking. What a gift. That we can. perambulate around the world without a second thought. Chris not everyone can do this some people can’t walk at all some people have disabilities and illnesses that keep them from taking steps. So taking a moment to acknowledge that and be grateful for whatever movement we can make and if you can’t walk whatever imaginary world you can walk in it is all again. A gift.
Renoir painted more than 4000 paintings in his lifetime, and continued right up to his death at age 78 in 1919. In the last years of his life, he had debilitating arthritis and severely limited mobility, so his assistant had to put the brush in his hands, and his hands were wrapped to avoid irritation. And he used a canvas on wheels to paint larger works.
But he still painted. He would have an assistant tie a brush to his hand, In the last parts of his life he created some amazing works, more abstract simpler, but still masterpieces of his style. When Matisse was and 90 years old he couldn’t see anymore, so he instead of painting, he cut out shapes from colorful paper that he had painted colors on too. Check this. And then he pasted those shapes onto canvas or onto other paper to create some of his most famous works. When Chuck Close was stricken with whatever disease he had checked this, he could no longer all the brush. So he started to but what he could do was make a circle by holding the brush in his mouth. So he started to create portraits using dots and circles and created some of his most amazing works that trick the eye and change the way we think about portrait painting. I could go on Frida Kahlo, when she was by a bus spent many months in her bed. She couldn’t walk for a long time, and had much pain the rest of her life. So she would create small works she became proficient in working with a small brush in her bed.
I can go on. Having a fully functional body is not a prerequisite to making art. Being able to actually take steps in the physical world is not a prerequisite to following your dreams. But this metaphor of stepping of walking is so prevalent that we often don’t even think about it. So beyond just acknowledging that, I want to unpack this idea of those steps, and where are they take us. And Dantes inferno, the renaissance adventure of self discovery, Dante Alighieri hero embarks on an adventure that takes him through many levels of heaven hell and heaven is adventure scape has three realms, Purgatorio, Paradiso, and whatever the other one is. Joseph Campbell also talks about this in the heroes journey or the Monomyth where which I will talk about in depth in another future podcast, but here I just want to point out that there are three parts to this adventure as well initiation The abyss, whatever that is called, and return. We think in threes it’s easy for our minds to wrap around three things thesis antithesis synthesis, seed duality creativity. Three simple steps.
For Dante it wasn’t that those steps were simple. But overall as a literary structure we could stay with our hero if we knew that he wouldn’t be in hell forever, that there was hope that he was going to after descending through the seven levels the seven layer dip of hell and back out again, that he would come to a Place of HOPE and comfort. And our Mindscape are inner cosmos, which Julian Jane’s the Princeton philosopher says is a metaphor and metaphorical concept that we have created over the millennia to help us navigate the world. Steps or how our minds work. Inside our brains inside our minds we can picture a space that we can actually walk around in with our metaphorical self. This allows us to picture possible scenarios, to practice future outcomes.To imagine ourselves doing some thing, even failing, making mistakes, and solve those problems in our minds, so we can then accomplish the deed in the real world. This can go either way. We can picture her selves falling down over and over, or we can imagine ourselves on a Ted talk stage with thousands of raving fans. Either way our brain helps us navigate our dreams.
So the idea of steps is built in. The path forward. This is what we do we per ambulate we walk we walk forward to the next opportunity, the next bonfire surrounded by family, the next adventure. And although our ancient selves walked up mountains like stan stair steps, walked up hills to look out to see the next vista, the idea of stairs themselves is as old as the pyramids. To. In fact that’s what the pyramids are there giant staircases each level built slightly smaller and slightly higher until the peak is reached. so pathways are about the body, and stairways are about our vision our eyes we want to be able to see what comes next. In our mind scape, steps take us higher. And this is where most cultures the concept of heaven lives. The earliest cultures the afterlife was not in the sky, but in the ground. Either there was a world within the earth where dead people lived in the next life, or the dead lived among us. It was only after cultures consolidated into kingdoms into power was the sky God prevalent. The sun god the sky God became one God out of the many.
What does this have to do with steps? Well suddenly the afterlife wasn’t so easy to get to. It was a place far away in the sky, and not only that you had to do some pretty amazing things to get there, you had to be perfect you had to follow all the rules. So the 10 Commandments, the eight fold path although Buddhism doesn’t believe in God or heaven. The seven levels of hell, so three steps seem quite easy. Still steps take us up further towards the vista towards heaven towards The future. In our minds we picture the future as being out there and offen up there. Instead of right here where we are. Future is a different place than now.
Think about that the future is a different place than now than here. Where will you be in your future. I want you to think of the past the present and the future these three steps as tools for how to think about your life. From the past we gain wisdom some cultures see the pass not behind them but actually in front of them, because they’ve all we already lived it. They can imagine it they can see it. Where the future, is actually behind them because their eyes can’t see it. Where do you see your future is it with you right now,? Or is it just around the bend where you can’t quite see it. I want you to think about this idea of steps and stairways of pathways of the past present in future and where you are in this whole scheme. When you think I want to be come an artist, is that in the future is that some place you can’t quite get to?
What if that place was right now right here with you? How would you act if you were an artist right now. You would paint you would sculpt, you would take photographs you would apply to shows you would put your work out there. So just be aware of this idea of steps and other pathway is just a metaphor. It’s a metaphor of the body it’s a metaphor that helps our bodies understand the scale of things, and that we can actually go someplace get someplace be someplace. But the fact is we are already there. We are already in this place we don’t have to walk down any path we don’t have to do any steps because that pathway is in your mind. You can take steps in your mind around that pathway up those stairs right now and be that artist.
The fact is our body love steps we love to feel the progress of having worked for some thing of having taken made that effort and got the reward. That is a beautiful thing that is a good thing. But just know this is just a metaphor. And so therefore you can create any metaphor you want in your mind around this. Maybe your metaphor instead of steps is a ladder maybe it’s a slide what if instead of taking tough steps one by one up a steep staircase towards your goal your metaphor involved sitting down on the edge of a cliff onto a ladder that was part of a fun ride letting go and sliding down that ladder into your dreams into a beautiful pool Full of Clearwater. Steps are not inevitable steps are just a metaphor that we use to take risk to learn to get reward. So if you feel you want to create a different metaphor of wings instead of feet I have a slide of a tree growing of roots going down into your new adventure, you can do that. Awareness helps you create metaphors that work for you.
We understand this intimately as artists when we create a painting we are creating a metaphor, an illusion of the world. That we see whether that world is in the physical world or in our mind. If we create a landscape we use softer colors and softer edges to create the illusion of distance the dark shapes are in the distance the lighter bright shapes are in the foreground.We take steps through our paintings with our minds so we are used to this metaphoricalPathway that we take into our paintings.
Resources:
Artist and activist Riva Lehrer makes the connection to disability in her art clear when she states, “Disability is the fuel of my work and the engine of my career.” Lehrer explores the spectrum of ability by portraying a wide variety of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances with disabilities through her lyrical, lush paintings. Born with spina bifida, Lehrer spent her childhood in and out of the hospital, but was able to obtain an accessible education through the progressive Condon School for Handicapped Children in Cincinnati, Ohio.
https://arthistoryteachingresources.org/lessons/disability-in-art-history/
