The musician who loved silence

Quietness as a muse

Somewhere I read “the musician who loved silence”. That day I noted it in my phone. No reference. I have read it often and thought about what it means to me through the prism of being an artist and not a musician.

How does it translate? The artist who loved a blank canvas?

As an artist who processes the world through a sketchbook, I don’t like the white page. Most of my online courses start with exercises in bypassing the blank page. The space that has potential for anything has too many options. Creative block comes from staring at that blank space with all the questions but none of the answers.

I mess up those pages, I add paint and mark and collage to answer some of those potentialities with intuitive disorder. Those newly marked pages then invite in the answers that I have been seeking, and the pages develop and flow. Those first birthings of marks help me to stop holding my breath and begin to express myself.

I may not be the artist who likes a blank page, but like the musician I certainly need stillness for restful contemplation. We live in a fast paced world, a sensory onslaught every day from which retreat can be difficult; sirens, flashing signs, reversing vehicles, shouting, an over-stuffed world. My tolerance for noise and visual clutter is lessening as I grow older.

I have been doing a lot of clearing and honing of my belongings, curating my space and my wardrobe - seeking simplicity. In the studio I have put away work that no longer feels a part of my conversation with the world. I have put up work that speaks of where I am now. It is a continuous creating and recreating of a project that has a push and pull of familiarity and at the same time an utter not-knowingness.

Where the musician loved silence, I love stillness. I need it for contemplation and reflection. It is a necessary point in the swing of the pendulum of creativity. In that stillness, in the quietude, in the white-page-moment is a tension, an unknowing, an invitation to trust your resources and to start, without preconception.

If you can take that stillness with you into the active part of art-making, stilling the inner critic, stilling the need to get it ‘right’, stilling assumptions about what makes good or bad art, I think you can bypass creative block and find creative flow more readily available.

Clear the clutter, get out the new sketchbook, the white canvas. Sit with the delightful tension of the unknown. Embrace the silent space before the anarchy of creativity moves through you.