This summer I took a week-long course at the Maine College of Art entitled “Art: Beyond Process”. In the mornings the eight participants (all visual artists) and the instructor, Canadian artist Stephanie Rayner, engaged in hours of discussion and reflection on myth, fairy tale, and scripture, listened to music and poetry, watched a film, and shared our work and our creative process. In the afternoons we each worked on a visual project, transforming an existing hardback book into a piece that expressed a theme of our choosing, using any materials we chose.

Among the questions we explored together was: Where does your creativity stumble? Another participant responded with an exact description of one of my own dilemmas: “In trying to describe or duplicate the subject rather than responding to it.” We have different reasons for this response, but the result is the same, work which is acceptable but never takes flight.

I spent the week doing the opposite, responding rather than describing or duplicating anything. By mid-week, I had descended into a state of blind following of impulse in which I felt like a shaggy, snuffling beast with its nose to the ground, chasing a scent (like a pig hunting truffles, I’ve thought since, but larger and shaggier). It was characterized by a complete absence of knowing - where I was going, what the result would be, - but a sureness in the instructions I was receiving. Compared to my other experiences of transformative process, in acting and writing, this one was much less conscious, more foggy and primal, and harder to define.

By week’s end, I hadn’t produced a useful or finished product, but I did come back with a new set of guidelines for traveling that obscure territory, which I believe will be applicable to the much more workaday world of illustration on assignment. Here’s the contract I wrote for myself at the end of the course:

“In increasing increments, as I am able,

1. I will stop before beginning, and listen. And keep listening.

2. I will follow impulse, not clever idea.

3. I will remain still until impulse comes.

4. I will give myself time to wander, seemingly aimlessly, after the scent I’m following.

5. I will gather, recognize, and honor the significance of symbol, meaning, message, and synchronicity.

6. I will trust the process to take me where I am going, no matter what it looks like, whether I understand or not.”

This approach would represent a radical departure from my usual method in illustrating a book. Often, with an assigned project, so much seems already given, especially when a book is the next in a series. And so much of the direction I take is influenced by my sense of what the publisher wants. (It occurs to me that most of us in children’s illustration are steeped in pleasing the client, because our earliest experience in the field is the years spent trying to catch someone’s attention, trying to get someone to like our work enough to take a chance on it. Getting published often seems to require us to focus not on our own expression but on what the market wants.)

I have had some book projects when there’s been no preconceived idea of what the book will look like and I’ve had a lot of room to experiment. In retrospect, I can see that I jumped pretty quickly at anything that started developing and seemed to make sense, out of relief of having something defined to hang onto. I wanted to understand. I pinned the process down with labels and concepts, continuing to think about it, but no longer responding to raw impulse. I certainly wasn’t following the vision of becoming a snuffling beast.

This early in this part of the process, I don’t know what impact these new behaviors might have on my work. I don’t think it necessarily means I won’t use models, or that my illustrations will no longer be realistic. But I do hope to be less tied to photographic references, and to increasingly rely on my emotional responses, on my intuitive sense of the subject. I hope to do a lot more roughs, more explorations and experiments, before I make decisions about final directions. I’m excited to see what connections I might make, and what images might emerge, if I really give myself time to mess around. I might find myself experimenting with mixed media, or changing scale, or using a new palette. When the deadline looms, I might have to return to the practical world, possibly truncating the journey. But the creation process, and probably the final product, will be that much richer and multi-layered for the time I allowed myself to play.

Published in newsletter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.
(Reproduced with permission.)