Picasso said, “In the future art will cure tooth ache!” Are we in his future now? Can art cure COVID-19? I won’t be ready to make that claim till maybe next year… but I will say this: When it comes to difficult physical, emotional, and spiritual situations that have always plagued our human experience, the arts have a transformational role to play that we are only just beginning to explore in all its mystery, detail, and depth. For now, I’ll sing the praises of just one aspect of the arts, useful to us all: the Artistic Attitude.
The magic of the artistic attitude applied to life appears when problems stop being problems and become meaningful processes instead. Whenever we approach our disturbances as problems we tend to treat them as a machine we expect to fix or a riddle to solve. But in our hearts we know life is more than just another nut to crack! When I am able to live my daily life as if I’m an artist, working in the medium of my own existence, each challenging occasion becomes a creative opportunity—no longer a pestering curse to eliminate so much as some weird and curious process that is “going somewhere.”
Like the green bud of a tree in Spring, processes unfurl and unfold. With each unfolding, we can become receptive to what's given, the disturbance itself guiding us in finding our way. I believe art is good medicine, especially in the darkest times, because artistic practice can engender an artistic attitude toward life. In Minstrels of Soul, Paolo Knill tells a beautiful story about living with an artistic attitude.
My father was a church musician and cabinetmaker. Sometimes, especially near Christmas, he would carve wooden figures. I always watched him to see how he did this, and sometimes he interrupted his singing and whistling – which always accompanied his work – to tell me something. One of his comments touched me deeply and is still very clear in my memory.
I remember that his knife became stuck in a dark knot, where a former branch had been. I expected that he would go to his special machine to cut the knot out and replace it with good wood, as he routinely did with office cabinets. "No," he said, looking at me. "Not here; this is a manifestation of nature, a gift of God. There are no mistakes in nature. This has to become something important within the sculpture. Perhaps it will become a flower." He then went on carving, and I observed how the knot later became a flower on the candleholder he finished.
I’ve often seen my students and clients crumple their art work the moment something happens they didn't expect. When I encourage them to experiment with the uncomfortable "surprise" and to make something out of it, I am still learning the same thing myself. As with previous challenging mysteries, so with COVID-19, a quiet voice keeps prompting me: “Make of it what you will.”
In my work, I love sharing different ways that art-making and aesthetic experience engender a creative attitude toward being alive. As we know, life’s means of unfolding itself, through changes we often resist, can be bewildering and fraught with pain. But an artistic sense of awe and possibility transforms our existential onslaught into a different kind of experience.
If the current state of the world is upsetting—pandemics, wars, on-going environmental destruction—how might we respond with an artistic attitude, individually and together? How might we see our lives, and even our home planet, as a “work-in-progress”
Whether humanity is the source of its own troubles or not, the more we bring an artistic attitude and its aesthetic sensitivity to even our most insurmountable challenges and frustrations, the more likely we are to stop acting like our own worst enemy, and become creative participants instead.
“Make of it what you will.”